What to see in a country built around its water

What the water is

Good-quality thermal water lies beneath more than 80% of Hungarian territory, and the country has an estimated 1,300 thermal springs, a third of which are used as spas. Only a short list of other countries has comparable thermal capacity, among them France, Japan, Bulgaria, Iceland and Italy.

Budapest sits on the reason. The city lies on a geological fault separating the Buda hills from the plain, and more than 30,000 cubic metres of water at temperatures from 21 to 76 degrees Celsius comes up through 118 thermal springs to supply its baths. Hungarian thermal waters have been used for 2,000 years, and the Romans were the first to build baths on the banks of the Danube in the first century.

The baths themselves come from three periods. Some in Budapest date from Turkish times and are still in use, others are modern, and the most famous were built at the turn of the nineteenth century in the grand style the city was building everything in at the time. Most offer medical treatments and massage alongside the pools.

Outside the capital the same water supports a network of spa towns. Lake Hévíz is the largest biologically active natural thermal lake in the world, with a record of use going back 2,000 years to the Roman era and a treatment regime in its present form dating back more than 200 years.

When to come

The Hungarian tourist season runs from April through October, and July and August are the busiest months.

That leaves a long shoulder on both sides worth knowing about. Spring and early autumn have the advantage that the baths, which are the one attraction that works in any weather, are more pleasant when the air is cool, and the wine regions are at their most interesting in September and October.

Winter works differently rather than not at all. The thermal pools run outdoors through frost, the capital's museums and three opera houses are on their full programme, and the country's spa towns take much of their domestic trade in the months when nobody is going to the lake.

European visitors make up more than 98% of arrivals, with Austria, Germany and Slovakia sending the largest numbers, and most arrive by car for a short stay. The practical consequence is that road traffic peaks in the same weeks the lake does.

What Budapest holds

Budapest drew the visitors back from the 1990s onward and it remains the country's most popular destination by a wide margin.

The inscribed part is specific. The banks of the Danube, the Buda Castle quarter and the whole of Andrássy Avenue are on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one property, which means the panorama rather than a single monument is what carries the designation.

Inside that area sits most of what a first visit covers: Buda Castle, which houses the Hungarian National Gallery among other museums, the Matthias Church on the hill above the river, the Parliament Building on the Pest bank, and the City Park at the far end of the avenue with a bath, a zoo and a mock castle in it.

The city has an unusual amount of performance for its size, with three opera houses and a dense programme of concert halls, which is what a musical tradition of that depth leaves behind in its capital.

The museum holdings are on the same scale and are concentrated rather than scattered. The castle hill carries the national gallery and the historical collections, the City Park end of Andrássy Avenue carries the fine arts and the applied arts, and the walk between the two along the avenue is itself the inscribed part of the property.

Andrássy Avenue also explains the city's shape. It was laid out in the late nineteenth century, together with the ring roads, the bridges and the parliament, for a country more than twice the size of the present one, and the resulting capital is larger in its gestures than the state that inherited it. A visitor is looking at the ambition of the Dual Monarchy rather than at the plans of the republic.

What is underneath

There are two hundred known caves under Budapest and several are open to visitors, which is a feature almost no other capital city has.

The geology explains it. Caves in the Buda hills were formed by thermal water rising from below rather than by rainwater soaking down from above, which produces different shapes and different mineral deposits from an ordinary limestone cave system.

The Pálvölgy Stalactite Cave, discovered in the 1900s, is the largest of the systems in the Buda hills and is a labyrinth on a considerable scale. The Szemlőhegy Cave has no stalactites and fewer tight passages, and its walls are encrusted with precipitates left by warm water dissolving mineral salts; its lowest level is clean enough to be used as a respiratory sanatorium.

The Aggtelek karst in the north-east is the country's other cave region and its natural World Heritage property, shared across the border with Slovakia, and it is a different and larger system from anything under the capital.

The Mátyás Cave on the edge of the city is the one for people who want the version with crawling in it, including a passage narrow enough to have earned its own grim nickname. Most of the Buda caves are visited on a guided route with lighting and steps, and the choice between the two kinds is made at the ticket desk rather than underground.

Where the country goes in summer

Lake Balaton in the west is the largest freshwater lake in central Europe and the second destination of the country after Budapest, with 2.5 million visitors recorded in 1994.

What makes it work is the shallowness. Much of the southern shore can be waded a long way out, which makes it a family lake, while the northern shore is steeper, backed by volcanic hills and the vineyards planted on them, and carries the older resort towns and the Tihany peninsula with its abbey.

The lake absorbs a large part of Hungarian domestic holidaying, so the difference between a July weekend and a June weekday on the same beach is considerable. Its own water is not thermal, but the spa town of Hévíz sits a few kilometres inland and many visits combine the two.

Beyond Balaton the countryside is set up for slow travel. Hungary has more than 400 camping grounds and more than 2,500 kilometres of dedicated bicycle lanes, and almost half of the 130,000 hectares of rivers and lakes are fished, with birdwatching, riding and hunting all established.

What the list covers outside the capital

Hungary holds 8 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, seven cultural and one natural, and only one of them is in Budapest.

The rest are spread across the country and are deliberately varied: the village of Hollókő with its preserved settlement pattern, the Benedictine abbey of Pannonhalma with its thousand-year monastic history, the Hortobágy puszta as a cultural landscape shaped by pastoral grazing, the early Christian burial complex at Pécs, the Tokaj wine region in the north-east, the Fertő lake landscape shared with Austria and the Aggtelek caves shared with Slovakia.

Three of those touch or cross a border, which is a fair account of a country whose cultural region is wider than its territory. Two of them can be visited from the other side as easily as from this one.

The practical shape of a trip follows from the geography. The country is 93,030 square kilometres, landlocked, mostly flat and small enough that Budapest works as a base for most of it, with Kékes at 1,014 metres the highest point and nothing that takes a full day to reach.

How the country is reached and crossed

Most visitors arrive by car and stay for a short period, which shapes what the country is set up for.

Hungary is landlocked and shares a border with seven countries, so it is reachable overland from every direction, and Austria, Germany and Slovakia together send the largest share of arrivals. European visitors account for more than 98% of the total, which makes this a regional destination rather than a long-haul one.

The internal distances follow from the size. At 93,030 square kilometres with a highest point of 1,014 metres, the country has no mountain range to drive around and no coast to follow, and the road and rail networks radiate from Budapest, which is efficient for reaching the capital and less so for crossing between two provincial towns.

Overnight stays were recorded at 27,695,465 during 2016, an increase of 7.0% on 2015, which is the scale the accommodation stock is built for.

What the plain offers

The Great Hungarian Plain is the part of the country most visitors skip and it holds the attractions that are least like anywhere else.

The Hortobágy is a World Heritage property inscribed as a cultural landscape, meaning the grassland is recognised for having been shaped by pastoral use over a very long period rather than for being untouched. It is grazing country with a herding tradition attached to it, and the flatness that makes it uninteresting from a car window is the point when standing in it.

The villages of the plain carry the folk traditions the culture is built on, and the region around Szeged and Kalocsa in the south is where the paprika is grown that gives Hungarian cooking its signature.

The plain is also where the thermal water is most heavily used away from Budapest. Spa towns across the region run a health tourism that is largely domestic, with treatment prescribed and partly funded through the health system, and a visitor arriving expecting a resort finds something closer to a public institution.

What to eat and drink where

The wine regions are the strongest reason to leave the capital for a day.

Tokaj in the north-east made sweet wines that were prized across Europe for centuries and has spent three decades rebuilding after four of production for volume. Villány in the south and the volcanic slopes above Balaton produce reds and whites that have nothing to do with the Tokaj style, and all three are close enough to visit from a base.

The food follows the same regional logic. Freshwater fish comes from the Danube and the Tisza and is cooked differently on each, the Great Plain is where the pastoral traditions and the beef dishes belong, and paprika, which became the defining Hungarian seasoning only in the nineteenth century after the peppers were adapted over generations, is grown in the south around Szeged and Kalocsa.

Budapest holds the pastry tradition, inherited from the same imperial kitchen that produced the Viennese one, and the coffee house culture that came with it survived in fragments and has been rebuilt.

Prices are part of what draws people. Hungary kept the forint rather than adopting the euro, and a visitor arriving from the eurozone finds restaurant and accommodation costs below what the same evening would cost in Vienna two hours upriver, which is one reason the short car trip from Austria is so common a pattern.

What a visit adds up to is a small country with one very large capital, water under most of it, and a set of things that can each be reached in an afternoon. Hungary: geography goes into the land it all sits on and Hungary: culture what the buildings were built for.