Three days in Budapest, done properly

Three days is the honest minimum for a first visit and, for most people, the right length. The city is compact enough that you are not spending hours in transit, and interesting enough that two days means choosing between the baths and the sights.

The single organising principle: keep each day on one side of the river. The Danube is wide, the bridges are long, and crossing twice in a day is the easiest way to lose an afternoon.

Day one — Pest

Start at the Parliament, and book the interior tour before you travel; it sells out. Walk south along the embankment past the Shoes on the Danube memorial — sixty pairs of iron shoes for the people shot into the river in 1944–45 — to the Chain Bridge.

Turn inland for St Stephen's Basilica and its panorama terrace, then take Andrássy Avenue north. It is a UNESCO-listed boulevard and it takes about an hour on foot to Heroes' Square, with the Opera House halfway. If your legs give out, the M1 — the 1896 yellow line, itself a World Heritage site — runs directly underneath it.

Finish in the Jewish Quarter, a ten-minute walk back south. Dinner there, and if you have the energy, the ruin bars start properly around ten.

Day two — Buda

Up the hill early. Take the funicular from Clark Ádám tér or bus 16; the walk is steep and the view is the same. Matthias Church, then the Fisherman's Bastion terraces, then the quiet lanes behind them, which almost nobody walks.

The Hungarian National Gallery is inside the castle itself and takes a comfortable two hours. Afterwards, walk south along the ridge and down to Gellért Hill. The climb to the Citadella is a steep half-hour and the view from the top is the best free thing in the city: the whole river bend, both Parliament and the Castle, in one frame.

At the bottom of the hill is Rudas, an Ottoman bath from the sixteenth century with a rooftop pool looking straight down the Danube. Check its single-sex day schedule first.

Day three — the bath, and what you missed

Give Széchenyi the morning. It is the enormous Neo-Baroque one in the City Park: eighteen pools, three of them outdoors and warm through the winter. Three hours is right. Take flip-flops.

The City Park is immediately outside: Vajdahunyad Castle, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Ethnography, the House of Music, the zoo. Pick one.

The afternoon belongs to whatever the first two days made you want more of. If nothing did, the Great Market Hall and the streets around it are a good last walk, and Margaret Island is the right choice if the weather is good.

What to book ahead

Only three things genuinely need it: the Parliament tour, anything at the Opera, and a table at a good restaurant on a weekend. Everything else you can turn up to.