Széchenyi Thermal Bath

The biggest medicinal bath in Europe, and the one in every photograph of Budapest: a mustard-yellow Neo-Baroque palace dropped into the middle of the City Park in 1913, with eighteen pools inside it.

Three of those pools are outdoors and kept warm right through the winter, which is the whole point of the place. Snow falling on a 38°C pool, with steam thick enough to hide the far end, is the single best thing this city does — and it does not work in August. The photograph everyone has seen, of men playing chess at a board floating in the water, was taken here, and the chess players are still there.

Inside, the complex runs to a scale that is hard to grasp from the entrance: thermal pools of graded temperature, steam rooms, saunas, a lap pool, and long corridors of changing cabins that have barely altered in a century.

It is also the busiest bath in Budapest by a wide margin. A weekday morning, or after four in the afternoon, makes a completely different visit from a Saturday at noon. Bring a swimsuit, a towel and flip-flops — everything is rentable on site and everything costs more than it should.