🇭🇺 Hungary
Budapest
Budapest (population 1.75 million in the city, 3.3 million in the metropolitan area — the capital of Hungary and one of the most beautiful cities in Europe) is in fact two cities joined by the Danube: Buda (the hilly western bank — the royal hill (Várhegy), the Fisherman's Bastion, the Buda Castle, the thermal bath springs that have been in use since the Roman city of Aquincum (1st century AD)) and Pest (the flat eastern bank — the Hungarian Parliament, the Grand Market Hall, the ruin bar scene and the Jewish Quarter). The river that divides them is also the visual heart of the city: the 8 bridges connecting Buda and Pest, the most beautiful of which is the Chain Bridge (Széchenyi Lánchíd — built 1849, the first permanent bridge across the Danube in Budapest and the first suspension bridge in Hungary), and the panoramic view from the Fisherman's Bastion (the most photographed image in Hungary) make the Danube the defining element of Budapest. Budapest is celebrated for its thermal baths (the geological foundation of the city is a series of thermal springs producing water at 21–76°C: the most important are the Széchenyi Baths (the largest thermal bath complex in Europe, in the City Park), the Gellért Baths (the most beautiful, in an Art Nouveau building of 1918), and the Rudas Baths (the Turkish-era baths of the 16th century)), for its ruin bars (the romkocsmák — the bars established in the abandoned buildings and courtyards of the Jewish Quarter from 2001, the most celebrated of which is Szimpla Kert (Simple Garden), the ur-ruin bar), and for its extraordinary fin-de-siècle café culture (the New York Café — the most beautiful café in the world).