Showing 1-18 of 18 results
-
City Zoo & Botanical Garden
This large zoo and garden, which opened with 500 animals in 1866, has a good collection (big cats, hippopotamuses, polar bear, giraffe), but most visitors come for a glimpse of the calves born in recent years by artificial insemination to Lulu the white rhinoceros. Away from the beasties, have a look at the Secessionist animal houses built in the early part of the 20th century, such as the renovated Elephant House with pachyderm heads in beetle-green Zsolnay ceramic, and the Palm House with an aquarium erected by the Eiffel Company of Paris.
-
Elizabeth Bridge
The city's bridges, both landmarks and delightful vantage points over the Danube, are stitches that have bound Buda and Pest together since well before the two were linked politically in 1873. There are a total of nine spans, including a railroad bridge, but the four in the centre stand head and shoulders above the rest.
-
Independence Bridge
Opened for the millenary exhibition in 1896, Independence Bridge has a fin-de-siècle cantilevered span. Each post of the bridge, which was originally named after Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph, is topped by a mythical turul bird ready to take flight. It was rebuilt in the same style in 1946.
-
Independence Monument
The charming lady with the palm frond proclaiming freedom throughout the city from atop Gellért Hill was erected in 1947 in tribute to the Soviet soldiers who died liberating Budapest in 1945. If you walk west for a few minutes along Citadella sétány north of the fortress, you'll come to what is arguably the best vantage point in Budapest.
-
Margaret Bridge
The city's bridges, both landmarks and delightful vantage points over the Danube, are stitches that have bound Buda and Pest together since well before the two were linked politically in 1873. There are a total of nine spans, including a railroad bridge, but the four in the centre stand head and shoulders above the rest.
-
Millenary Monument
In the centre of Heroes' Sq (Hősök tere), which is at the northern end of Andrássy út and in effect forms the entrance to City Park, is this 36m-high pillar backed by colonnades to the right and left.
-
Nyugati Train Station
The large iron and glass structure on Nyugati tér (known as Marx tér until the early 1990s) is Nyugati train station, built in 1877 by the Paris-based Eiffel Company. In the early 1970s, a train crashed through the enormous glass screen on the main façade when its brakes failed, coming to rest at the 4 and 6 tram line.
-
Opera House
The neo-Renaissance Hungarian State Opera House, among the city's most beautiful buildings, was designed by Mikl�s Ybl in 1884. If you cannot attend a concert or an opera, join one of the guided tours, which usually includes a brief musical performance. Tickets are available from the souvenir shop on the eastern side of the building facing Haj�s utca.
-
Pater Noster
One of the strangest public conveyances you'll ever encounter can still be found in a few office and government buildings in Budapest. They're the körfogó (rotator) lifts or elevators, nicknamed 'Pater Nosters' for their supposed resemblance to a large rosary. A Pater Noster is essentially a rotating series of individual cubicles that runs continuously.
-
Raoul Wallenberg Memorial
A statue called the Serpent Slayer in honour of Raoul Wallenberg by Pál Pátzay stands in XIII Szent István Park. Of all the 'righteous gentiles' honoured by Jews around the world, the most revered is Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and businessman who rescued as many as 35,000 Hungarian Jews during WWII.
-
Advertisement
-
Roosevelt Tér
Roosevelt tér, named in 1947 after the long-serving (1933-45) American president, is at the foot of Chain Bridge and offers among the best views of Castle Hill in Pest.
-
Shoes on the Danube
This new monument to Hungarian Jews shot and thrown into the Danube by members of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in 1944 is by Gyula Pauer. It's a simple affair - 60 pairs of old-style boots and shoes in cast iron, tossed higgledy-piggledy on to a bank of the river -but it is one of the most poignant monuments yet unveiled in this city of so many tears.
-
St Gellért Monument
Looking down on Elizabeth Bridge (Erzsébet híd) from Gellért Hill is the St Gellért monument, an Italian missionary invited to Hungary by King Stephen to convert the natives. The monument marks the spot from where the bishop was hurled to his death in a spiked barrel in 1046 by pagan Hungarians resisting the new faith.
-
Statue Of Elizabeth
North of Elizabeth Bridge and through the underpass is a statue of Elizabeth, the Habsburg empress and Hungarian queen and the consort of Franz Joseph much beloved by Magyars because, among other things, she learned to speak Hungarian. Sissi, as she was affectionately known, was assassinated by an Italian anarchist in Geneva in 1898.
-
Statue Of Imre Nagy
Southeast of V Kossuth Lajos tér is a statue of Imre Nagy, the reformist Communist prime minister executed in 1958 for his role in the Uprising two years earlier. It was unveiled with great ceremony in the summer of 1996.
-
Statue Park
Home to more than 40 busts, statues and plaques of Lenin, Marx, Béla Kun and 'heroic' workers that have ended up on trash heaps in other former socialist countries, Statue Park is a truly mind-blowing place to visit.
-
Szabadság Tér
Independence Square, one of the largest in the city, is a few minutes' walk northeast of Roosevelt tér. In the centre is a memorial to the Soviet army, one of the very few still left in Budapest. At the eastern side of the square is the fortress-like US Embassy backing onto Hold utca (Moon St). This street, until 1990, was named Rosenberg házaspár utca (Rosenberg Couple St) after the American husband and wife Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed as communist spies in the USA in 1953.
-
Széchenyi Chain Bridge
The city's bridges, both landmarks and delightful vantage points over the Danube, are stitches that have bound Buda and Pest together since well before the two were linked politically in 1873. There are a total of nine spans, including a railroad bridge, but the four in the centre stand head and shoulders above the rest.
-
Advertisement
Showing 1-18 of 18 results
