Both Banks in a Day: Castle Hill, the Chain Bridge and the Parliament

Budapest is two old towns facing each other across the Danube. Buda is the hilly west bank, crowned by a castle district; Pest is the flat east bank, where the nineteenth-century capital spread out. The city's other walks stay in Pest. This one gives you a day for both sides, and for the bridge that first joined them for good.

The morning belongs to Castle Hill: a neo-Romanesque lookout, a coronation church, a hospital hidden in the rock, the President's palace and the Royal Palace itself. Then you walk down to the river, cross the Chain Bridge and follow the Pest bank north, past an Art Nouveau palace and the Academy of Sciences, to a quiet memorial on the embankment and the Parliament at the end of the day.

It is a full day, with three or four places worth going inside. Pick the ones that suit you, and treat the rest as views along the way.

Start early on the white terraces of Fisherman's Bastion, which look like a medieval fortification but were built between 1895 and 1902 as a lookout. The architect Frigyes Schulek designed them in neo-Romanesque style, with seven towers that stand for the seven chieftains of the Hungarians who founded the country in 895.

The name is older than the building. It is usually traced to the fishermen's guild said to have guarded this stretch of the city walls, or to Fishtown, the old fishermen's quarter on the riverbank below. From the arcades the whole of Pest lies across the water, with the Parliament on the left: the end of today's walk, already in sight.

Right behind the bastion rises Matthias Church, and the two belong together: Schulek also led its rebuilding between 1874 and 1896, adding the diamond-patterned roof tiles and the spire with its gargoyles. The church itself is far older. It was long known as the Church of Our Lady, and took the name of King Matthias in the nineteenth century, after the king who had its southern tower transformed.

Under Ottoman rule, from 1541 to 1686, it served as Buda's main mosque, its altars removed and its painted walls plastered over. Later it became a coronation church: Franz Joseph and Elisabeth were crowned King and Queen of Hungary here in 1867, and Charles IV and Zita, the last to be crowned, on 30 December 1916.

Castle Hill is hollow. Under its streets runs a network of caves and cellars, and part of it was turned into an emergency hospital: work began in 1939 and the surgical centre was finished in 1944, in time for the Siege of Budapest. Built for 60 to 70 patients, it at one point held some 600 wounded soldiers.

The Hospital in the Rock was used again during the 1956 revolution, then converted into a nuclear bunker for doctors and nurses, and from 1962 to 2007 it was classified top secret. It opened as a museum in 2007, and the visit leads through its wards, operating rooms and bunker equipment.

Walk south along the hill to Szent György tér and the neoclassical Sándor Palace, built around 1803–1806 for Count Vincent Sándor, after whom it is named, to designs by Mihály Pollack and Johann Aman. Nineteen Hungarian prime ministers lived here. Bombing in the Second World War left it in ruins, and only after 1989 was the shell roofed and its walls secured. The interior was renovated in 2002, and since 2003 the palace has been the office and residence of the President of Hungary.

A few steps on, the long front of Buda Castle fills the southern end of the hill. The first royal residence here was built by King Béla IV between 1247 and 1265. What you see is later: a Baroque palace raised under Maria Theresa between 1749 and 1769, then enlarged by Alajos Hauszmann, who doubled its Danube front before the palace was inaugurated in 1912.

The siege of 1944–45 reduced it to ruins. It was rebuilt in a simplified Baroque style, with the interiors ready only in the 1980s, and today it houses the Hungarian National Gallery, the Budapest History Museum and the National Széchényi Library.

At the foot of the hill you reach the river at the Buda end of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, the first permanent bridge in the Hungarian capital. It was designed by the English engineer William Tierney Clark and built under the Scottish engineer Adam Clark, no relation, and it opened on 20 November 1849. The stone lions at each end, carved by János Marschalkó, were added in 1852. Beside it, the Castle Hill Funicular, running since 1870, is the easy way up for another day.

Retreating German troops blew the bridge up on 18 January 1945, leaving only its towers, and it reopened in 1949. Since a renovation from 2021 to 2023 it has been closed to private cars, which makes the crossing on foot far calmer.

On the Pest side, the square opens onto the curving front of Gresham Palace, an Art Nouveau office and apartment building completed in 1906 for the Gresham Life Assurance Company, to designs by Zsigmond Quittner and József Vágó. Its name goes back to Sir Thomas Gresham, the sixteenth-century English financier who founded the Royal Exchange in London. After a long restoration it reopened in 2004 as the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace.

On the same square stands the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and with it the man the bridge is named after. In 1825 Count István Széchenyi offered a year's income from his estate to found a learned society, and other delegates at the Diet soon followed his example. The Renaissance Revival headquarters on the river, designed by Friedrich August Stüler, was inaugurated in 1865.

Follow the embankment north towards the Parliament until you reach a row of iron shoes at the water's edge. The Shoes on the Danube Bank were conceived by the film director Can Togay and made with the sculptor Gyula Pauer, and unveiled on 16 April 2005: sixty pairs of period shoes, cast in iron. They remember the people shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944–1945, most of them Jews.

The walk ends at the Parliament Building, Imre Steindl's neo-Gothic seat of the National Assembly. Construction began in 1885, the building was inaugurated in 1896 for the country's thousandth anniversary, and it was completed in 1904. It has been the largest building in Hungary ever since, and its dome rises to 96 metres. Since 2000 the Holy Crown of Hungary has been on display in its central hall.

This morning you saw the Parliament from Fisherman's Bastion. Now you stand on the other side of that view, looking back across the water to the hill where the day began.

In one day you have walked from the royal town on the hill to the capital that grew up on the plain, and crossed the bridge that joined them. The names repeat along the way: Schulek on both the bastion and the church, Széchenyi on the bridge and the Academy, and the river in view almost the whole time. For the market hall, the synagogue and the grand avenues deeper in Pest, the city's shorter walks pick up where this one ends.