A plain surrounded by mountains that belong to other countries

What the three regions are

Hungary has three major geographic regions, subdivided into seven smaller ones, and the division is made by the Danube.

The Great Alföld lies east of the river and covers more than half the country's territory. It contains the basin of the Tisza and its branches, it is bordered by mountains on all sides, and within it there is more variety than the word plain suggests: fertile soil in places, sandy areas in others, and stretches of wasteland and marsh that were drained and reclaimed over the past two centuries.

Transdanubia is the hilly region west of the Danube, extending to the Austrian foothills of the Alps. It is more broken, better watered and more densely settled than the Alföld, and it holds Lake Balaton, the largest lake in central Europe.

The northern hills complete the set, running north-east from the Danube bend along the Slovak border, and they contain the country's highest ground, Kékes at 1,014 metres, along with the volcanic soils that produce the northern wine regions.

Why the mountains are somewhere else

The Carpathian Basin is a well-defined geographical unit ringed by mountains, and Hungary occupies the floor of it. The Carpathians curve around the north and east, the Alps approach from the west and the Dinaric ranges lie to the south-west, and almost all of that high ground is now in Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Austria.

That is not an accident of geology but a consequence of a treaty. Hungary's modern borders were first established after the First World War, when by the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 it lost more than 71% of what had been the Kingdom of Hungary, 58.5% of its population and 32% of the Hungarians.

The geographical result is a country that is almost entirely lowland inside a basin whose rim belongs to its neighbours. The rivers rise outside the border, the mountains that catch the rain are outside the border, and the forests, minerals and hydroelectric potential that a basin rim provides went with them.

What Hungary kept was the best of the soil and the whole of the water problem. A flat country at the bottom of a basin receives everything that runs off the surrounding highlands, which is a description of an agricultural advantage and of a flood risk in the same sentence, and Hungarian history contains a great deal of both.

What the rivers do

The major rivers are the Danube and the Tisza. The Danube is navigable within Hungary for 418 kilometres and the Tisza for 444, and the less important rivers include the Drava along the Croatian border, the Rába, the Szamos and others.

The Danube bend north of Budapest is the one piece of scenery in the country that everyone knows. The river turns sharply south between two hill ranges, and the towns along it, Esztergom, Visegrád and Szentendre, hold the basilica, the castle and the artists' colony that make the stretch the standard day trip from the capital. It is also the point at which the river stops being a border with Slovakia and becomes an internal Hungarian one.

Both rise outside the country and leave it again, which is the defining hydrological fact. Hungary controls neither the headwaters nor the outflow of its main rivers, so water quantity, water quality and flood timing are all determined by rainfall and management decisions in neighbouring states, and Hungarian water policy is necessarily diplomatic before it is technical.

The Tisza is the river that shaped the Alföld. Before regulation it meandered across the plain, flooded annually over enormous areas and created the marsh and wetland that covered much of eastern Hungary, and the nineteenth-century works that straightened and embanked it cut off meanders, converted that wetland into farmland and shortened the river by a substantial fraction of its length.

That was the largest engineering project in Hungarian history and it is still being argued about. It created the agricultural Alföld and it also lowered the water table, dried out habitats, and left a river confined between embankments that concentrates flood peaks rather than spreading them.

What the water underneath is worth

Hungary sits on thermal water, and it is one of the country's genuine natural endowments. Good-quality thermal water is available in great quantity beneath more than 80% of the territory.

The reason is the basin. The crust beneath the Carpathian Basin is unusually thin, geothermal heat flow is correspondingly high, and the porous sedimentary fill holds water that the heat below warms, which produces springs and drillable reservoirs across almost the whole country.

Budapest itself sits on the geological boundary that produces the baths. The Buda side rises into hills of limestone and dolomite cut by thermal springs, and the Pest side is flat alluvium on the plain, so the two halves of the capital that were joined into one city in the nineteenth century are two different landscapes with a river between them. The caves under Buda, formed by the same thermal water, run for kilometres beneath the streets.

That resource has been used continuously for two thousand years. Roman baths, Ottoman baths and the nineteenth and twentieth-century spa buildings described in the culture article all draw on the same water, and the spa tradition is a use of geology rather than a fashion.

It is also an energy question that Hungary has begun to treat seriously. Geothermal heat is the one significant domestic energy resource a landlocked country with no hydrocarbons possesses, and district heating drawn from thermal water is expanding in exactly the places where the resource is best, which is most of the country.

What grows on it

The Alföld is genuinely fertile in its better parts, and Hungarian agriculture is correspondingly significant for a country of this size.

The country is known for producing high-quality peppers, which are often made into paprika, and it grows a wide range of fruit including many varieties of apple, pear, peach, grape, apricot, watermelon and melon. Cereals, maize, sunflower and livestock make up the bulk by area and value.

Wine is the specialised end of it and the regions are distinct. Volcanic soils in the north, the Balaton shores, the sandy plains and the Villány hills in the south each produce differently, and the sweet wines of Tokaj were among the most valued in Europe for centuries.

The constraint on all of it is water. A continental climate with hot dry summers on a plain that has been drained and embanked produces drought as reliably as it produces flood, and irrigation drawn from a river system controlled upstream is not a secure solution to it, which is why groundwater abstraction has risen and the water table has fallen.

What Balaton is

Lake Balaton in Transdanubia is the largest lake in central Europe and the single most important geographical feature of Hungarian domestic life after the Danube.

It is shallow, which determines everything else about it. Water depth averages a few metres, so the lake warms quickly in summer and can be waded far from shore, and it freezes in cold winters solidly enough to walk on. That shallowness makes it a family bathing lake rather than a boating one and explains why the northern and southern shores developed differently: the south has the gentle beaches, the north the vineyards on volcanic hills and the deeper water.

For a landlocked country it functions as a coast. The summer holiday, the second home, the beach and the resort economy all attach to Balaton, and a Hungarian talking about going to the water means this lake.

Its ecology is under pressure from exactly that use. A shallow lake in a warming continental climate, ringed by settlement and receiving agricultural runoff, has water level and water quality problems that periodically become national news, and the level is managed by a sluice at the outflow into the Sió canal.

What lives on the plain

The Alföld looks empty and is a distinctive habitat rather than an absence of one. The puszta, the open grassland of the eastern plain, supports birds, plants and a grazing system found in few other places in Europe, and part of it is protected as a national park and inscribed on the World Heritage List as a cultural region rather than a natural one, because the grassland is a product of centuries of grazing rather than of nature left alone.

The grey cattle, the racka sheep with their spiral horns and the horse-herding tradition of the plain belong to that landscape and are maintained partly as heritage. What sustains them is the same drainage and grazing regime that made the puszta in the first place, and abandoning it would turn the grassland into scrub within a generation.

The wetlands that survived the drainage are the other habitat of consequence. Hortobágy, the Danube floodplain and the reed beds of Balaton and the smaller lakes are on the migration routes between northern Europe and Africa, which makes a landlocked country of moderate size an important stop for birds that never spend a season here.

The forest is northern and western, in the hills, and it is a fraction of what the country had. Hungary was substantially forested before the plain was cleared for agriculture, and reforestation over the past century has raised the cover considerably without changing the fundamental character of a country whose land is farmed. Most of what has been planted is production forest of a single species rather than restored woodland.

What the climate does

Hungary has a continental climate, with hot summers, cold winters and a wide annual temperature range for a country at this latitude, because the ring of mountains cuts it off from both Atlantic and Mediterranean moderation.

The basin position produces the extremes. Summer heat accumulates over a flat interior with nothing to disperse it, and winter cold settles into the same basin and stays, and the transitional seasons are short at both ends of the year. Rainfall is moderate and unevenly distributed, with the west receiving considerably more than the eastern plain.

Drought is the direction of change. The Alföld has been getting drier and hotter, the growing season is shifting, and a country whose agriculture is a substantial part of its identity as well as its economy is facing a climate trend that runs directly against it.

Flood is the other half and the two are not contradictory. A basin receiving runoff from mountains in six other countries can be short of water for months and dangerously full of it in a week, and Hungarian water management has to be built for both conditions at once. Hungary: economy goes into what the land produces and Hungary: history how the borders came to run where they do.