Buda Castle

A royal palace on the site of a medieval one, rebuilt after almost every siege this city has had — and it has had many.

The first fortress here went up in the thirteenth century. Matthias Corvinus turned it into a Renaissance court in the fifteenth, one of the most admired in Europe, which the Ottomans then held for a century and a half and the Habsburg reconquest of 1686 largely destroyed. The palace that followed was rebuilt and enlarged repeatedly through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reaching its greatest extent under Franz Joseph.

Then the siege of 1944–45 burned it out completely. What stands today is a post-war reconstruction, simplified from the imperial version — the great dome is a modern replacement rather than the original — and the medieval levels underneath were excavated during the rebuilding and are now open as part of the Budapest History Museum.

It houses that museum and the Hungarian National Gallery, which holds Hungarian art from Gothic altarpieces to the twentieth century and is worth a comfortable two hours.

The grounds and terraces are free and open. The eastern terrace gives the classic view over the Danube to Pest. Reach it by the 1870 funicular from Clark Ádám tér, by bus 16, or on foot up a genuinely steep hill.