A city built on hot water, and priced unlike its neighbours

Budapest is the capital of Hungary and a city of about 1.7 million people, split by the Danube into two halves that behave quite differently: Buda is hilly, green and quiet on the west bank, Pest flat, dense and busy on the east. They were separate towns until 1873, when Buda, Óbuda and Pest were merged into one city. The river banks, Castle Hill and Andrássy Avenue are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Romans held a town called Aquincum on the Buda side. A Hungarian kingdom formed here in the tenth century; the Ottomans took the city in 1541 and held it for about a hundred and fifty years, which is where the bathing culture comes from. Almost everything a visitor photographs, though, is younger than that: after the 1867 compromise created Austria-Hungary, a fifty-year boom built the Parliament, the boulevards, and in 1896 the first underground railway on the European mainland. The city was besieged and largely wrecked in the winter of 1944–45, and rose against Soviet rule in 1956.

It is known for its thermal baths — the city sits on more than a hundred thermal springs, which is why the water is the one thing here you cannot do anywhere else — for the Parliament and the Chain Bridge lit at night, for ruin bars in the old Jewish quarter, for paprika, and for costing noticeably less than Vienna, ninety minutes up the river.