City Park (Városliget)

Sou Fujimoto’s building opened in January 2022 on the site of an old exhibition pavilion, and the park’s operator is unusually clear about the terms: every new building in the park can be explored freely and without charge, and you only buy a ticket for concerts and exhibitions. So the ground floor is a place to walk into and sit down in, not a lobby to pass through.

The roof is the reason to go. It waves, it was designed from the idea of sound vibrating, and it is pierced by exactly 100 openings of different shapes, which drop daylight all the way down to the lowest exhibition level. Under them hangs a golden ceiling with a leaf pattern that, with the glass walls, is meant to feel like walking under the trees.

Look for the stepped wall to the right of the entrance, which is built to be sat and worked on, and take the spiral staircase down to see the ticketed half: the Sound Dome, a projection dome with 30 speakers, the permanent exhibition walked with headphones that trigger the exhibits, and eight large interactive sound installations in the Creative Sound Space.

It is shut on Mondays. The Sound Dome also closes on the first Tuesday and Wednesday of every month, which is the one that catches people out.

The museum opened in its new building the same year as the House of Music and does something more unusual with its roof: it hands it back to the park. Over 7,000 square metres of it are planted and grassed, rising to the height of the surrounding tree crowns, and the operator’s own invitation is to lie down in the grass or have a picnic on it. Walk up the steps along the perimeter and you get City Park and Heroes’ Square from above.

Look at the glass facade on the way up. It carries nearly half a million small pixels in patterns built from twenty Hungarian and twenty international ethnographic motifs, Venezuelan, Congolese, Cameroonian, Mongolian, Chinese and Melanesian among them, inserted by robot into more than 2,000 laser-cut aluminium gratings. NAPUR Architect won the competition for it over Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and BIG.

Two things inside cost nothing either. The Ceramics Space holds almost 4,000 ceramic objects from around the world along both sides of a 40 metre staircase. And the City Park Visitor Centre, in the wing facing Heroes’ Square, has a free exhibition built round a 55 square metre model of Budapest with over 6,000 3D-printed buildings on it.

The exhibitions are all below ground, to keep sunlight off the objects, and they are shut on Mondays. The entrance hall facing Heroes’ Square opens anyway, 10:00 to 18:00, which makes the Visitor Centre the Monday option.

Ignác Alpár built this for the 1896 millennial celebrations as a three-dimensional catalogue of a thousand years of Hungarian architecture, in Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. It was meant to be temporary. Visitors liked it so much that they gave it its popular name and the government rebuilt the whole thing in durable materials.

The instruction here is to look for the bits of other buildings, because Alpár quoted real ones rather than inventing styles. The portal of the Church of Ják, chapel elements from Pécs Cathedral, the crenellated houses of Lőcse and Besztercebánya, St Catherine’s Gate from Brassó, the loggia of the town hall at Bártfa and the Charles Gate of Gyulafehérvár are all in here somewhere.

Cross the Bridge Gate over the stone bridge with the lion statues, Romanesque to your left and Gothic to your right, and find Miksa Róth’s rose window in the courtyard.

Two towers opened to the public in 2015. The Gatehouse is 37 metres tall, with a photo exhibition inside and then the battlements, where you can pick out the rose window and the raven with a ring in its beak. The Apostles’ Tower is 150 steps to a 360 degree panorama over Gellért Hill, Buda Castle and St Stephen’s Basilica. Tower tours start every hour, in English and Hungarian.

Walking up to the castle costs nothing. Going into the museum or up either tower needs a ticket, sold by the Hungarian Museum of Agriculture inside, and no partner sells them. The museum shuts on Mondays, but the Gatehouse Tower does not, which makes it the thing to do here at the start of the week.

One basin, two completely different days out. In summer the ice rink becomes a boating lake: the same water in front of the castle, the same building behind it and the same operator.

In winter the Városligeti Műjégpálya, a listed monument and the city’s skating ground since the 1870s, lays 12,070 square metres of ice here, the largest outdoor artificial ice surface in Europe by its operator’s own count. The season runs from about November to the start of March, and tickets are sold only by the rink itself. Our City Park Ice Rink guide has the hours, how tickets and skate hire work, and the rules for children.

In summer, from about May to the middle of September, the same water carries 32 pedal boats, 10 rowing boats and 10 paddleboards. Hire is by the half hour, tickets are sold at the lakeside, and the point of taking a boat rather than walking round is the view back at the castle from the water. It is not a lake for swimming, and the operator would rather you did not feed the ducks bread.

Between the two seasons there is neither boating nor skating. If you are here in late autumn or early spring, plan the castle and the museums instead and treat the water as scenery.

The BalloonFly is a tethered helium balloon on Mimosa Hill, next to the thermal bath, held by a steel cable and carrying up to 30 passengers at a time 150 metres up. It is not a hot air balloon and it does not go anywhere.

A loudspeaker names the sights in Hungarian and English, the crew move people round the basket so everybody gets the full circle, and from up there the Museum of Ethnography’s roof garden and the House of Music’s pierced roof read as the designs they are.

The whole of the advice on this one is weather. The balloon depends on it, and the operator publishes a forecast for today and the next two days, slot by slot, each marked as ideal, uncertain or down. Check that forecast on the morning of your visit rather than walking over on spec: people do turn up on clear days and find it down, and the queue when it is busy can run to an hour or more.

Tickets are sold at the balloon and on its own website, and an online ticket still has to be swapped for a numbered one at the cash desk, so it does not skip the queue. A flight lasts 10 to 15 minutes, and children under 6 or shorter than 120 centimetres cannot go up. Treat it as something to do if it happens rather than something to build a day around, and go early in the day if the forecast is good.

Mimosa Hill was raised as a lookout point by the park’s own designer, and the balloon is a revival rather than a novelty: a Ballon Captif run by the Paris balloon captain Louis Godard carried a dozen passengers at a time from this park during the 1896 exhibition, dozens of times a day.

The Main Playground runs to over 13,000 square metres and about fifty pieces of equipment: six kinds of slide, ten kinds of swing and roundabout, four kinds of spinner, three sandpits, seven spring toys, two big rope climbs and ten in-ground trampolines. It is in the south-eastern corner near the Dózsa György út and Ajtósi Dürer sor crossing, fenced to a metre and a half with five ways in, and open every day from 08:30 to dusk.

The centrepiece is a three-storey climbing frame built in the shape of the balloon in Pál Szinyei Merse’s painting, with a reproduction of the painting beside it. Stand inside the frame and look up and the red and white stripes appear. In summer the draw is a long winding stream with locks, wells and water toys along it. There is a statue of the poet Sándor Kányádi under one of the trees.

The second playground is as big and quite different. The Children’s Traffic Park, near the House of the Hungarian Millennium, is a miniature city with working traffic lights, zebra crossings, road signs, railway barriers, roundabouts and junctions, plus a station and an airport with a play security scanner, and children ride through it on bikes, scooters and pedal cars. There is a music playground beside the House of Music as well.

Toilets with baby-changing are free to Liget+ members. Dogs are not allowed in the Main Playground.