Aquincum Museum Tours

Four hours, your party alone, with a live guide. The point of it is that Roman Aquincum was never one place. The town you walk round at the museum was the civil half, and the military half, with a legionary fortress of nearly 6,000 men and the bigger of the two amphitheatres, lies under the streets of Óbuda two kilometres south.

A guide is the only practical way to read that second half, because it survives in pieces separated by housing blocks and main roads. It runs Tuesday to Saturday, takes up to twelve people and can be booked as little as two hours before it starts, which makes it a realistic plan for a free morning rather than something to fix months out.

It can be cancelled free of charge, so it suits a trip whose days are not yet settled.

Booked by email at least seven working days ahead, Tuesday to Friday, in English, French or German. Other days and other languages can be asked for through the same address.

The fee is charged per group rather than per person, for 1 to 25 people, which is unusually good value for two or three travelling together and the reason this is worth considering at all. Groups of more than 30 are divided into smaller ones.

One rule applies whoever you are. Tours at the museum and the Hercules Villa may only be given by authorised museum staff or permit holders, so you cannot bring a guide of your own and have them work on site.

The museum runs guided tours along an accessible route through the park, Tuesday to Friday, booked ahead at regisztracio@aquincum.hu. They cost nothing for visitors with physical disabilities, for wheelchair users and for one companion per person.

This is the most useful thing the museum offers that almost nobody knows about. The main exhibition building is wheelchair accessible; the ruins are uneven Roman surfaces, and this is the museum’s answer to that. The step-free approach from the bus stop is in our getting there guide.

An hour and a half out in the streets rather than in the park, taking in the legionary fortress, the cavalry fort, the late Roman fort and the military town amphitheatre. They are run by the museum and need a minimum of seven people, so they suit a group rather than a couple.

If you are two and want the same ground covered, the private tour above is the way to get it.

The villa is a rich Roman house on Meggyfa utca whose mosaics ended up under and beside a school. Under the school building is the wine harvest mosaic, a procession for Dionysus with a drunken Hercules in it; the large protective building holds three more mosaic floors, one of them showing Hercules and Deianeira; and a small building beside it has the boxers’ mosaic from the bath suite’s changing room. Late Roman stone casket graves lie in the garden.

The figural centre of that Hercules and Deianeira mosaic, 60,000 stone tiles of two or three millimetres each, is not at the villa. It is at the museum, which is worth knowing before you make the trip for it.

Guided tours are given on request, Tuesday to Friday, through the museum’s booking email. Bear in mind that the villa is a separate site with its own ticket, open only from May to the end of October, and that the Budapest Card is not valid there.

If it is the ruins in front of you, book the museum’s own guide. They know the site, the fee is per group, and one of them turns a field of low walls into a street plan.

If it is Roman Budapest as a whole, take the private tour. The civil town is the part that survived; the part that mattered militarily is scattered through modern Óbuda, and you will not find it on your own.

Seven working days is the museum’s minimum, and it is a real one. If you are already in Budapest and want something for tomorrow, the private tour is the only option that can still be booked.

The private tour can be cancelled free of charge, so it can go in the diary before your days are settled. A museum tour booked a week out is an arrangement with a small institution rather than a transaction, so only make it once you are sure.