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Coverage / Hungary

Hungary

Eastern Europe

A landlocked Central European country on the Danube, built around Budapest's grand river cityscape, the volcanic Tokaj wine hills, the open puszta grasslands of the Great Plain, and a deep folk-culture calendar of carnivals, thermal baths and festivals.

6 activities · 6 pairings · 9 verified providers

What you can do in Hungary

Culinary / Cooking

Budapestyear-roundBudapest is the best place to learn Hungarian cooking because the classic dishes are still everyday food here, not museum pieces. Paprika-driven stews, chicken paprikash, stuffed cabbage, chimney cake and river-fish soup all come out of a home tradition that hands-on schools in the city teach directly. The strongest programmes start where the cooking does, at a market hall like the Great Market Hall on the Pest embankment, shopping for paprika, sausage and seasonal produce with a chef before cooking a full menu from scratch. Two long-running local operators run these classes, one a large dedicated cooking school and the other the team behind the city's first food tour, so you can pick between a studio kitchen and a smaller, tour-led approach.

Museums & Galleries

Budapestyear-roundBudapest holds two of Central Europe's great public art collections within a short tram ride of each other. On Heroes' Square, the Museum of Fine Arts pairs a first-rank holding of European Old Masters, El Greco, Raphael, Goya and Rembrandt among them, with one of the region's best Egyptian and Classical Antiquities collections. Across the river in Buda Castle, the Hungarian National Gallery tells the parallel story of Hungarian art itself, from medieval altarpieces to the grand nineteenth-century canvases of Mihaly Munkacsy and on into modernism. Together they let you see the international canon and the national school side by side, both with English-language tours.

Music & Culture Festivals

Sziget FestivalBudapestAugSziget Festival turns an entire Danube island into a week-long city of music every August. Founded in 1993 as Diaksziget, a student festival on Budapest's Obuda Island, it has grown into one of Europe's largest and most internationally mixed music and arts events, with a 2018 edition that drew 565,000 people and a programme of more than a thousand performances a year. The pull is the format as much as the line-up: campers live on the island for the full run, and beyond the headline stages there is theatre, circus, a world-music tent and art installations spread through the woods. It is a festival you inhabit rather than just attend.

Wildlife Safaris

HortobagyMar Apr May Sep Oct NovThe Hortobagy is the largest continuous natural grassland in Europe and the single best place in the country to watch birds in numbers. Its open puszta, sodic marshes and old fishpond systems sit on a major migration route, and every autumn up to a hundred thousand common cranes stage here, flooding out to their roosts at dusk in one of the continent's great wildlife spectacles. Alongside the cranes the plain holds Great Bustard, Saker Falcon, Red-footed Falcon, Imperial Eagle and wintering geese, with more than three hundred species recorded in the park. Hungarian-run birding operators work the site with hides and vehicle circuits that get you onto the grassland at the right hours.

Wine / Spirits Education

TokajApr May Jun Sep Oct NovTokaj is the birthplace of one of the world's great sweet wines, made here from grapes shrivelled by noble rot long before Sauternes existed. The region was mapped and its top vineyards classified as early as 1732, and the whole cultural landscape of volcanic hills, cellars and villages became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002. What makes it a learning destination rather than just a tasting stop is the density of estates that will walk you through the mechanics of Aszu: the botrytis harvest, the puttonyos measure, the long ageing in labyrinthine cellars cut into rhyolite. Both a historic first-growth estate and a family cellar in Mad open structured, multi-vintage programmes that put the sweet wines and the new dry Furmints side by side.

Witness / Attend

BusojarasMohacsFebBusojaras is Hungary's great winter-scaring carnival, and there is nothing else like it in the country. Over six days in February the Danube town of Mohacs fills with busos, masked figures in carved wooden faces and shaggy sheepskin cloaks who parade with cowbells and noisemakers to drive out winter. It began with the town's Sokac Croatian community and has become a citywide rite recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage in 2009. The signature moments are the crossing of more than five hundred busos over the Danube by rowboat on Carnival Sunday, the march through the streets with horse-drawn and homemade floats, and the burning of a coffin symbolising winter on a bonfire in the main square. There is no ticket office and no single organiser to book through. You come to the town, stand in the crowd on the squares and the riverbank, and let it happen around you.

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Culinary
Museums
Music Festivals
Wildlife Safaris
Wine & Spirits
Witness / Attend

Upcoming events in Hungary