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Applied Arts Museum
This stunning building, designed by Ödön Lechner, was completed for the Millenary Exhibition (1896). The galleries, which surround a central hall of white marble modelled on the Alhambra in southern Spain, contain a wonderful array of Hungarian furniture dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, Art Nouveau and Secessionist artefacts. However, at the last time visited, there were only temporary exhibitions on display.
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Buda Castle Labyrinth
The labyrinth, a 1200m-long cave system some 16m under the Castle District, looks at how the caves have been used - from prehistoric times - in nine halls and chambers. The admission fee is very high by Budapest standards, but it's all good fun and a relief from the heat and the crowds above on a hot summer's day.
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Budapest History Museum
Also known as the Castle Museum, this place covers 2000 years of the city on three floors of rather jumbled exhibits. Restored palace rooms from the 15th century can be entered from the basement, which contains a display on the palace in medieval Buda. On the ground floor is an exhibition entitled 'Budapest in the Middle Ages', while
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Castle Hill
Castle Hill, a 1km-long limestone plateau towering 170m above the Danube, contains Budapest's most important medieval monuments and museums and is a Unesco World Heritage Site. It is the premier sight in the capital, and with its grand views and so many things to see, you should start here.
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Dreher Brewery & Beer Museum
Budapest's - and Hungary's - largest beer maker has a museum at its brewery where you can look at displays of brewing and bottling over the centuries, watch a film about beer-making and/or get stuck into a generous tasting session.
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Electrotechnology Museum
This museum has a collection of 19th-century generators, condensers and motors, and the world's largest supply of electricity-consumption meters. The enthusiastic staff will show you how the alarm system of the barbed-wire fence between Hungary and Austria once worked. There's also a display on the nesting platforms that the electric company kindly builds for storks, so they won't try to nest on the wires and electrocute themselves.
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Ethnography Museum
This museum offers an easy introduction to traditional Hungarian life, with thousands of displays in 13 rooms. The mock-ups of peasant houses from the Őrség and Sárköz regions of western and southern Transdanubia are well done, and there are some priceless objects collected from Transdanubia. The building was designed in 1893 to house the Supreme Court; note the ceiling fresco, Justice , by Károly Lotz.
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Ferenc Hopp Museum Of East Asian Art
Ferenc Hopp Museum of East Asian Art is in the former villa of its benefactor and namesake. Founded in 1919, the museum has a good collection of Indonesian wayang (shadow) puppets, Indian statuary and Lamaist sculpture and scroll paintings from Tibet.
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Foundry Museum
This museum is housed in the Ganz Machine Works foundry that was in use until the 1960s, and the massive ladles and cranes still stand, anxiously awaiting use. The exhibits include cast-iron stoves, bells and street furniture.
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Franz Liszt Memorial Museum
This is the building where the great composer lived in a 1st-floor apartment from 1881 until his death in 1886. The four rooms are filled with his pianos (including a tiny glass one), portraits and personal effects.
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Golden Eagle Pharmacy Museum
Just north of Dísz tér on the site of Budapest's first pharmacy (1681), this branch of the Semmelweis Museum of Medical History contains an unusual mixture of displays, including a mock-up of an alchemist's laboratory and a small 'spice rack' used by 17th-century travellers for their daily fixes of herbs.
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György Ráth Museum
Most of the Chinese and Japanese collection of ceramics and porcelain, textiles and sculpture is housed in the György Ráth Museum, in a gorgeous Art Nouveau residence a few minutes south down Bajza utca.
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Holocaust Memorial Center
This centre, opened in 2004 on the 60th anniversary of the start of the Holocaust in Hungary, displays pages from the harrowing 'Auschwitz Album', an unusual collection of photographs documenting the transport, internment and extermination of Hungarian Jews, found by a camp survivor after liberation. In the courtyard, a sublimely restored synagogue from 1924, designed by Leopold Baumhorn, hosts temporary exhibitions.
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House of Hungarian Photographers
The House of Hungarian Photographers is an interesting venue in the city's theatre district with top-class photography exhibitions. It is in delightful Mai Manó Ház, which was built in 1894 as a photography studio, and has the bizarre meaning 'Modern Devil House'.
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House Of Terror
This museum, housed in the same building that served as headquarters of the dreaded ÁVH secret police, purports to focus on the crimes and atrocities committed by both Hungary's fascist and Stalinist regimes, but the latter, particularly the years after WWII leading up to the 1956 Uprising, gets the lion's share of the exhibition space (almost three dozen rooms, halls and corridors over three floors).
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Hungarian Agricultural Museum
This rather esoteric museum is housed in the stunning baroque wing of Vajdahunyad Castle, built for the 1896 millenary celebrations on the little island in the park's lake and modelled after a fortress in Transylvania (but with Gothic, Romanesque and baroque wings and additions to reflect architectural styles from all over Hungary). Here you'll find Europe's largest collection of things agricultural (fruit production, cereals, wool, poultry, pig slaughtering, viticulture etc).
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Hungarian National Gallery
The Hungarian National Gallery is an overwhelmingly large collection that traces the development of Hungarian art from the 10th century to the present day. The largest collections include medieval and Renaissance stonework, Gothic wooden sculptures and panel paintings, late-Gothic winged altars, and late Renaissance and baroque art.
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Hungarian National Museum
This large neoclassical structure purpose-built in 1847 contains Hungary's most important collection of historical relics. Look out for the enormous 3rd-century Roman mosaic from Balácapuszta; the crimson silk royal coronation robe; the reconstructed 3rd-century Roman villa from Pannonia; the treasury room with pre-conquest gold jewellery; a stunning baroque library; and Beethoven's Broadwood piano.
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Hungarian Natural History Museum
This museum has lots of child-friendly hands-on interactive displays over three floors. The geological park in front of the museum is well designed, and there's an interesting exhibition focusing on both the natural resources of the Carpathian Basin and the flora and fauna of Hungarian legends and tales.
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Hungarian Railway History Park
This mostly outdoor museum contains more than 100 locomotives (most of them still working) and an exhibition on the history of the railroad in Hungary. There's a wonderful array of hands-on activities - mostly involving getting behind the wheel - for kids. From early April to late October a vintage diesel train leaves Nyugati train station for the park four times a day. The fare is included in the admission price.
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Imre Varga Exhibition House
This space exhibits works by Imre Varga (1923-), one of Hungary's foremost sculptors, who seems for decades to have sat on both sides of the political fence - sculpting Béla Kun and Lenin as dexterously as he did St Stephen, Béla Bartók and even Imre Nagy. A short distance southwest of the museum is more of Varga's work: a group of metal sculptures of rather worried-looking women holding umbrellas.
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Jewish Museum
In an annexe of the Great Synagogue is the Jewish Museum, which contains objects related to religious and everyday life, and an interesting hand-written book of the local Burial Society from the 18th century. The Holocaust Memorial Room relates the events of 1944-45, including the infamous mass murder of doctors and patients at a hospital on Maros utca. English-language tours are available hourly.
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Kassák Museum
Sharing the same building as the Vasarely Museum but facing the inner courtyard, the Kassák Museum contains some real gems of early-20th-century avant-garde art, as well as the complete works of the artist and writer Lajos Kassák (1887-1967). It is a three-hall art gallery on the 1st floor.
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Kiscelli Museum & Municipal Gallery
Housed in an 18th-century monastery, later a barracks that was badly damaged in WWII and again in 1956, the exhibits at this museum southwest of Flórián tér attempt to tell the story (from the human side) of Budapest since liberation from the Turks. The museum counts among its best displays a complete 19th-century apothecary moved here from Kálvin tér, ancient signboards advertising shops and other concerns and rooms furnished with Empire, Biedermeier and Art Nouveau furniture and bric-a-brac.
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Ludwig Museum
Budapest's most important collection of contemporary art has moved from the Royal Palace on Castle Hill to the palatial (and equally controversial) Palace of Arts (Mûvészetek Palotája) opposite the National Theatre. The museum is the only one collecting and exhibiting international contemporary art.
