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Hungary is a landlocked Central European country in the Carpathian Basin, famed for its grand architecture, thermal hot springs, rich culinary traditions, and the vibrant split-city capital of Budapest.

Key Highlights & Attractions

• Budapest (The Capital): Divided by the Danube River, the city features the historic Buda Castle and Fisherman's Bastion on the hilly western side, and the energetic boulevards, Jewish Quarter ruin bars, and the massive neo-Gothic Hungarian Parliament Building on the Pest side.
• Thermal Baths & Spas: Budapest is known as the capital of thermal baths, with famous spots like the expansive Széchenyi Baths offering outdoor mineral spring pools year-round.
• Lake Balaton: Affectionately called the "Hungarian Sea," this massive freshwater lake is Central Europe's largest and a top summer destination for swimming and relaxing.
• Wine & Cuisine: Traditional comfort food centers on gulyás (goulash), paprika dishes, and sweet chimney cakes (kürtőskalács), paired with world-renowned wines from regions like Tokaj and Villány.
• Rich Culture & History: The country boasts a deep classical music heritage, over 400 bird species for nature lovers, and unique historical towns like Esztergom and Eger
Transcript
00:00:07Hungary, a country that has never been easy to define.
00:00:13Most people know Budapest, but beyond the capital,
00:00:18the land opens into something completely different.
00:00:26Hillsides covered in mysterious doors,
00:00:29hide wine cellars carved deep into volcanic rock.
00:00:37Castles cling to narrow ridges of stone,
00:00:41rising above forests that seem to go on forever.
00:00:47And in a country with no coastline,
00:00:50the largest lake in Central Europe became Hungary's very own sea.
00:01:01For more than a thousand years, empires came from every direction,
00:01:07leaving their mark on almost everything.
00:01:14Palaces outlived the families who built them,
00:01:18while cities, destroyed by war, rose from their ruins.
00:01:26Even today, a fairytale fortress still crowns the hills,
00:01:32its towers watching over the city.
00:01:36And through the middle of it all, runs the Danube.
00:01:43It bends around mountains, passes beneath castles,
00:01:48and finally reaches a city that became one of the most beautiful capitals on Earth.
00:01:56This is Hungary, one of Europe's most unusual countries.
00:02:20There are beautiful cities in Europe,
00:02:23and then there's Budapest.
00:02:29They call it the Queen of the Danube,
00:02:34a city whose riverfront is considered one of the world's great urban landscapes.
00:02:41But Budapest was never really one city to begin with.
00:02:48Buda climbed into the hills on one side of the river,
00:02:51while Pest spread across the plain on the other.
00:02:59For centuries, the Danube kept them apart.
00:03:04Then came the Seichenje Chain Bridge,
00:03:07the first permanent bridge across the Danube in Hungary.
00:03:16Buda and Pest finally had a connection
00:03:19the river could no longer take away.
00:03:23But some of what makes this city extraordinary
00:03:25isn't visible at all.
00:03:33More than a hundred thermal springs
00:03:35push naturally heated water toward the surface,
00:03:38feeding a bathing culture that has endured here for centuries.
00:03:47At Heroes Square, Hungary turned its own history into something monumental.
00:03:57The Millennium Monument lifts the Archangel Gabriel above a vast semicircle of statues,
00:04:04kings, leaders, and figures chosen to tell Hungary's story in stone.
00:04:15The fairytale fortress on Castle Hill was never really a fortress at all.
00:04:27Fisherman's bastion wraps around the hillside like a crown.
00:04:35Seven white towers, joined by long arcades, open terraces, and sweeping staircases, spill from one level to the next.
00:04:51Through its arches, it feels as though Budapest is constantly appearing between the stone.
00:05:02Following the line of Buddha's old defenses,
00:05:06the bastion was built for beauty rather than battle,
00:05:10turning the edge of Castle Hill into one enormous balcony over the city.
00:05:20Its towers represent the seven Madiar tribes that founded Hungary.
00:05:30Behind all those terraces, Matthias Church changes the picture completely.
00:05:42Its Gothic tower narrows higher and higher into a needle of stone.
00:05:47While beneath it, thousands of glazed tiles cover the roof in colorful patterns.
00:05:58It's one of the oldest landmarks on Castle Hill, a royal church where kings and queens were once crowned.
00:06:11Seen together, Fisherman's bastion and Matthias Church seem impossible to separate.
00:06:19And everywhere the stone opens, Budapest simply fills the space between them.
00:06:35Hungary built its parliament as though the building itself needed to prove something.
00:06:46Nearly 300 meters of white stone stretch along the Danube, broken by spires, arches, and a great red dome at
00:06:56the center.
00:07:01From across the river, there's too much to take in at once.
00:07:05Hundreds of windows and towers reflected in the water beneath it.
00:07:11And that grandeur was deliberate.
00:07:19Hungary created it as the nation approached its millennium celebrations,
00:07:23at a moment when Budapest was becoming one of the great capitals of Europe.
00:07:33Every detail was meant to feel extravagant.
00:07:38Hundreds of sculptures across its façade.
00:07:42Countless spires and arches.
00:07:45And enough ornament that hardly any part of the building was left undecorated.
00:07:55By day, the parliament covers half the riverfront.
00:08:00By night, the entire building turns gold and pours its reflection into the Danube.
00:08:11It was built to represent Hungary.
00:08:14Instead, it became something larger.
00:08:18The building that defines Budapest itself.
00:08:29Vydahunyad Castle is a thousand years of Hungarian history built all at once.
00:08:41Medieval towers rise beside Renaissance walls.
00:08:45And Romanesque arches lead toward Baroque palaces.
00:08:51Across the water, it looks like generations of rulers kept adding to the same enormous castle.
00:08:59But none of them did.
00:09:06Built for Hungary's millennial celebrations in 1896,
00:09:11its architect borrowed from famous buildings across the old kingdom of Hungary,
00:09:17fitting centuries of architecture together in a single place.
00:09:25The original was temporary.
00:09:27But Budapest loved it enough that it was rebuilt permanently in stone and brick.
00:09:36A monument made to remember Hungary's past eventually became part of it.
00:09:46There are buildings that rise above Budapest.
00:09:50St. Stephen's Basilica holds the city beneath it.
00:10:00It's copper dome climbs 96 meters above the rooftops.
00:10:04And its footprint is more than 4,100 square meters,
00:10:09making it the largest church in Budapest.
00:10:16It took more than half a century to build.
00:10:19And halfway through, the enormous dome collapsed completely.
00:10:26They cleared the ruins and razed it all over again,
00:10:30eventually reaching the same height as the Hungarian parliament.
00:10:38One of its towers now holds the largest bell in Hungary,
00:10:43weighing more than nine tons.
00:10:50beneath the dome rests something stranger.
00:10:54The mummified right hand of St. Istvan,
00:10:58a relic that has survived for nearly a thousand years as Hungary's holy rite.
00:11:08From above, the basilica seems almost impossibly large.
00:11:14An entire city of rooftops spreading around a single dome.
00:11:24Buddha Castle looks as though it has stood above the Danube forever.
00:11:30Almost nothing about it has.
00:11:37The palace stretches across the southern end of Castle Hill,
00:11:41its wings enclosing courtyards and gardens around the central dome.
00:11:50For centuries, this was the home of Hungarian kings,
00:11:55expanded again and again until an entire royal complex covered the hillside.
00:12:02But the palace has rarely survived unchanged.
00:12:11Wars with the Ottomans devastated its medieval form,
00:12:15and centuries later,
00:12:17the Battle of Budapest left its halls burned and broken open to the sky.
00:12:28What stands today emerged from those ruins,
00:12:33simpler in places,
00:12:35transformed in others,
00:12:37but still carrying the scale of the palace that came before it.
00:12:45For everything the castle has lost,
00:12:48somehow it has never learned to look diminished.
00:12:56Gellert Hill climbed sharply from the Danube,
00:13:00a wall of forest and rock breaking suddenly from the river bank.
00:13:09From its summit,
00:13:12nothing in Budapest can hide.
00:13:15The river,
00:13:17its bridges,
00:13:18and entire neighborhoods lie completely exposed.
00:13:27That beauty is exactly why the citadella was built here.
00:13:36After crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1848,
00:13:41the Habsburgs raised a fortress across the summit,
00:13:45not to defend Budapest,
00:13:47but to keep watch over it.
00:13:54At the highest point,
00:13:56a bronze woman lifts a palm leaf high enough to be seen across the city,
00:14:02a symbol of victory first claimed by the Soviets who placed her there.
00:14:11When their regime disappeared,
00:14:13Hungary didn't tear her down.
00:14:16They removed the Soviet symbols and gave the monument a new meaning instead.
00:14:22freedom itself.
00:14:28And so there she remains,
00:14:30like a guardian over the city,
00:14:33holding a symbol of freedom against the open sky.
00:14:42Perhaps that's what makes Budapest so beautiful.
00:14:45It grew from opposite banks of the same river,
00:14:49each side becoming something more extraordinary.
00:15:02From outside,
00:15:04it looks like a hillside full of doors and nothing else.
00:15:1387 of them,
00:15:14carved straight into volcanic rock,
00:15:17each leading into a tunnel that runs 10 to 40 meters underground.
00:15:27This is Korparafshi Pintsashore.
00:15:34It was used to store the region's wine at a perfect temperature,
00:15:39dug by hand by German settlers in the mid-1700s.
00:15:45The doors are still the only sign anything is there at all.
00:15:52Behind each one,
00:15:54the tunnels keep going,
00:15:56deeper than the hillside above them would ever suggest.
00:16:05There was never enough mountain for this castle.
00:16:09Built atop a spine of volcanic rock,
00:16:13Buldecker clings so closely to the ridge,
00:16:16it almost seems carved from it.
00:16:22The mountain dictates everything.
00:16:26Where the walls rise.
00:16:30Where the towers stand.
00:16:34Even where the castle ends.
00:16:40At its farthest point,
00:16:43a narrow walkway leaves the fortress entirely.
00:16:47Running along a blade of stone.
00:16:51The lion's rock.
00:16:56Nothing but open sky and a sheer drop on both sides.
00:17:01Ending at a lookout over the Zemplain hills.
00:17:07From here, the edge of the Tokai wine country spreads across in every direction.
00:17:20After the Mongol invasion, the castle was built into this ridge.
00:17:26Fortresses like this began rising wherever the land itself could become the strongest defense.
00:17:35The mountain here was always the strongest wall.
00:17:46Along the Danube,
00:17:48Centendree rises in layers of pastel walls,
00:17:52orange rooftops and church towers.
00:17:59The river moves quietly below,
00:18:02while the old town climbs the hillside above it.
00:18:08The main square is the heart of the town,
00:18:12surrounded by colorful Baroque buildings,
00:18:14and watched over by church spires from every direction.
00:18:21That skyline was not built by accident.
00:18:29At the end of the 17th century,
00:18:33Serbian families fleeing Ottoman rule crossed north into Hungary,
00:18:37and settled here beside the Danube.
00:18:43They rebuilt their communities around their churches,
00:18:47filling this small town with towers that rose above nearly every cluster of homes.
00:18:57The Blagova-Stenska church became one of the clearest expressions of that new identity.
00:19:09Above the rooftops,
00:19:11a ring of old stone walls circles the top of Castle Hill.
00:19:17It encloses the oldest building in Centendra,
00:19:23St. John the Baptist Church.
00:19:29The largest of them stands apart from the square entirely.
00:19:35Belgrade Cathedral.
00:19:4048 meters tall.
00:19:42It was built by refugees who had fled the city,
00:19:46and carried its name north with them.
00:19:53By the 20th century,
00:19:55that same layered, unplanned beauty drew a different kind of newcomer.
00:20:03Painters began arriving,
00:20:05transforming Centendra once again,
00:20:08this time into one of Hungary's great centers of art.
00:20:17In the quiet countryside of northwestern Hungary,
00:20:21an entire village appears to float above the water.
00:20:28They balance on nothing more than wooden stilts.
00:20:37Long piers reach farther and farther from the shore,
00:20:41until the village seems to continue across the lake.
00:20:49It wasn't supposed to exist.
00:20:53Lake Bocode was created in 1961 to cool a nearby power station.
00:21:01Warm water flowed through the reservoir year-round,
00:21:05keeping much of it from freezing.
00:21:12The fishermen noticed it first.
00:21:14If the lake never froze,
00:21:16neither did the fishing season.
00:21:20They built small cabins to store boats, nets, and supplies.
00:21:26One became ten,
00:21:28then dozens more.
00:21:34Today, the power station is no longer what draws people here.
00:21:40They come,
00:21:42for the village nobody ever intended to create.
00:21:50In 1552, the city of Vesprim fell to the Ottoman Empire.
00:21:56Its bishop did not surrender with it.
00:22:03He moved the seat of the diocese to Sumeg Castle,
00:22:07overlooking the town below.
00:22:12Walls follow the entire crown of the hill,
00:22:15enclosing towers, courtyards,
00:22:18and enough space for an entire seat of power to survive behind them.
00:22:27Sumeg became both a sanctuary and a stronghold,
00:22:32the place from which the bishops of Vesprim continued to govern
00:22:35while their city remained under threat.
00:22:42A church that refused to fall with its city,
00:22:46hid in plain sight for the next 200 years.
00:22:54The Danube makes one of its most dramatic turns through northern Hungary.
00:23:01Forced between ancient volcanic hills,
00:23:04the river bends nearly 180 degrees before continuing toward Budapest.
00:23:15This sweeping curve became known as the Danube Bend.
00:23:24The river and the forest press against each other with nothing in between.
00:23:31On one side, the town of Naughty Maraş stretches along the river bank.
00:23:40On the other, tucked beneath the mountainside,
00:23:44lies Hungary's smallest town, Visegrad.
00:23:52The surrounding forests hide a network of walking trails and an alpine bobsled winding through the trees.
00:24:04Above it, perched on the highest ridge,
00:24:07the Visegrad fortress watches over the valley below.
00:24:15Hungarians call it Feligvar, the castle in the sky.
00:24:25From its walls, the entire bend opens at once.
00:24:32The landscape made every decision that followed.
00:24:38Kings didn't choose this hill for its beauty.
00:24:41They chose it because almost nothing could reach it.
00:24:50After the Mongol invasion of 1241,
00:24:54King Bela IV ordered a new generation of stone fortresses to defend the kingdom.
00:25:04Visegrad became one of the greatest.
00:25:14Every empire that took this city left something behind,
00:25:19instead of erasing what came before.
00:25:27Peck's never tore down its past.
00:25:30It just kept building on top of it.
00:25:37At its center,
00:25:39Sechenya Square gathers nearly 2,000 years of that history into one place.
00:25:47Pastel facades curve around the square,
00:25:50where the town hall still serves as the seat of the city's government.
00:25:59That layering becomes impossible to miss across the square.
00:26:05A great green dome rises above pale stone walls,
00:26:10crowned not by a crescent, but a cross.
00:26:17It began as the mosque of Pascha Qasim,
00:26:22and became the largest surviving example of Ottoman architecture in Hungary.
00:26:32When Christian rule returned, they didn't tear it down.
00:26:37They turned it into a church instead.
00:26:44The dome stayed.
00:26:46The walls stayed.
00:26:47The walls stayed too.
00:26:48Only the minaret was destroyed.
00:26:51The one part too Ottoman to leave standing.
00:26:59Directly in front of it.
00:27:01The holy trinity statue marks another disaster the city survived.
00:27:06Raised after a plague swept through Peck's in the early 18th century.
00:27:15And then, the cathedral appears.
00:27:24Four towers rise together 60 meters above what feels like everything.
00:27:34It doesn't simply sit in the city.
00:27:37It reigns over it.
00:27:43Built as the seat of the diocese,
00:27:46it existed to hold worship and authority in one place.
00:27:52Inside, the style shifts entirely.
00:27:56Gothic in structure, but wrapped in 19th century color and detail from top to bottom.
00:28:09Outside, stands a statue of Bishop Ignaz Sapisi,
00:28:13one of the churchmen who spent his life rebuilding what Peck's kept losing.
00:28:22Today, it still holds mass as it always has.
00:28:27One of the few places in Peck's where every layer of its history is still in active use.
00:28:37Even beyond the old city walls, the pattern continues.
00:28:45A long staircase climbs Calvaria Hill between Stations of the Cross,
00:28:50toward a chapel that has been built, lost, and razed again above the city.
00:29:01Almost nothing here was ever fully erased.
00:29:09Peck's never rebuilt by starting over.
00:29:12It rebuilt by keeping what still worked,
00:29:16and removing only what it refused to be mistaken for.
00:29:27It looks like it's guarded this valley for 500 years.
00:29:31But Lilifarid has never once been a fortress.
00:29:40Deep in the Book Mountains,
00:29:42the forest closes in on every side.
00:29:47Thick, dark green,
00:29:49pressing right up against pale stone walls that shouldn't belong here.
00:29:59Spires and mismatched domes climb into a jagged roofline.
00:30:06One road threads down through the valley to reach it.
00:30:14The lake holds its own reflection of the mountains,
00:30:18close enough to touch the building's edge but never quite reaching it.
00:30:26Even the Sinva waterfall beside it isn't natural.
00:30:31The tallest in Hungary,
00:30:34engineered the same year they built everything else.
00:30:42The Palace Hotel of Lilifarid was built as a luxury mountain retreat.
00:30:51Inside, the illusion holds.
00:30:55A hundred and thirty rooms,
00:30:57and no two shaped the same.
00:31:01It only ever needed to look the part.
00:31:05Famously called it,
00:31:07the Wine of Kings,
00:31:09and the King of Wines.
00:31:16St. Teresa Chapel has watched over the vineyard since the 1750s.
00:31:23In 2015, someone found an old image of Christ inside it,
00:31:29and built an eight and a half meter granite statue because of it.
00:31:37The wine made Tokaj famous,
00:31:41but the land made the wine.
00:31:48Hungary has no coastline,
00:31:50so it made one around a lake.
00:31:55Lake Balaton is the largest lake in Central Europe,
00:32:00stretching 77 kilometers across Western Hungary.
00:32:07The water glows in shades of turquoise and emerald,
00:32:12colors that seem almost too vivid for a lake this far from the sea.
00:32:22Nearly 20 towns wrap around more than 200 kilometers of shoreline,
00:32:28each turning toward the water in its own way.
00:32:36Multiple harbors break the shoreline,
00:32:39sailboats and ferries crossing between them all summer.
00:32:45They call it the Hungarian Sea,
00:32:48but Balaton is almost impossibly shallow.
00:32:56Its average depth is barely three meters,
00:33:00and along parts of the southern shore,
00:33:03you can walk hundreds of meters into the lake
00:33:05before the water ever becomes deep.
00:33:13Even its name remembers a completely different landscape,
00:33:17derived from a Slavic word associated with marsh or swamp.
00:33:26Hungary never really had a sea.
00:33:29Lake Balaton became one anyway.
00:33:39Known as the cultural capital of Lake Balaton,
00:33:43much of what earned Kesteli the title can be traced back to a single name.
00:33:50The Vestetic family transformed this quiet town
00:33:54into one of Hungary's great centers of art,
00:33:58learning and culture.
00:34:05On the western end of the lake,
00:34:07red rooftops and tree-lined streets spread from the shoreline.
00:34:11But at its center,
00:34:13stands the lasting symbol of a family
00:34:16whose influence reached far beyond its walls.
00:34:24Feshtetic Palace,
00:34:26the crown of Kesteli.
00:34:32It wasn't just a residence.
00:34:34It became a center of culture,
00:34:37where music, literature and learning flourished.
00:34:44During Soviet occupation,
00:34:46staff hid the Halakon Library behind a false wall to save it.
00:34:52Holding more than 80,000 volumes,
00:34:55it's the only aristocratic library in Hungary
00:34:59that still exists exactly as it was.
00:35:07Yet for all its history,
00:35:10Kesteli has never become trapped in the past.
00:35:16Life here always returns to the water,
00:35:20where the Seaget-Furder Island bath
00:35:22has become one of the town's most recognizable landmarks.
00:35:29Kesteli didn't have to choose between being a cultural capital and a lake town.
00:35:34It simply became both.
00:35:43On March 12th, 1879,
00:35:47the Tisa River broke through its defenses
00:35:50and swallowed almost all of Seaget.
00:35:58Of more than 5,000 houses,
00:36:01fewer than 300 survived.
00:36:08After seeing the ruins himself,
00:36:12Emperor Franz Josef promised that Seaget would be rebuilt
00:36:15more beautiful than it had ever been.
00:36:2235 countries answered the call.
00:36:26Its Grand Boulevard still carry the names of the cities that helped rebuild it.
00:36:35At the heart of the city stands the votive church.
00:36:44Its enormous red brick towers rise like a monument to the city's survival.
00:36:53It was built as a vow of thanks for surviving the flood,
00:36:57replacing the smaller church that had stood here before.
00:37:06The Great Synagogue rose during the same rebuilding era.
00:37:15Its ornate architecture reflects the Jewish community that helped make the city prosperous again.
00:37:27And beneath all of it, the Tisa still runs through the city.
00:37:33It nearly erased Seaget once.
00:37:36Everything around it is what came after.
00:37:45It's considered the most beautiful village on Lake Balaton.
00:37:51And once you see where it was built, it's hard to argue.
00:37:59Tehani rises above the lake on a volcanic peninsula.
00:38:07Until Lake Balaton receded in the 18th century.
00:38:11It was an island.
00:38:13An isolated world with another lake hidden inside it.
00:38:21The volcanoes disappeared long before the village arrived,
00:38:26leaving behind hills, ancient geyser cones,
00:38:30and soil where entire fields of lavender now turn purple every summer.
00:38:40At the highest point stands Tehani Abbey.
00:38:48King Andrew I founded it in 1055
00:38:52and chose the crypt beneath it as his burial place.
00:38:55But something else survived with him.
00:39:03The abbey's founding charter contains the earliest known continuous Hungarian phrase preserved in writing.
00:39:16An island became a peninsula.
00:39:19The volcanoes went silent.
00:39:22But almost everything that made Tehani extraordinary stayed behind.
00:39:32No Ottoman army ever took this castle.
00:39:36The lake did more to defend it than any soldier ever did.
00:39:45From above, the walls of Sieg Liget still trace the entire ridge in one unbroken line.
00:39:58Ruin towers.
00:40:01Enclosed courtyards.
00:40:03And layers of stone climb toward the summit,
00:40:06leaving the full shape of the fortress visible across the hill.
00:40:15Lake Balaton stretches out below.
00:40:19A chain of volcanic peaks rise from the same ancient landscape.
00:40:27Sieg Liget's peak is the smallest of them.
00:40:30And the only one still crowned with a castle you can walk through.
00:40:39The hill was once nearly surrounded by the lake itself, reachable from one direction.
00:40:48That single approach became its greatest defense.
00:40:57Built in the 1260s by Benedictine monks, the castle guarded the road through centuries of war that brought down fortress
00:41:05after fortress.
00:41:11Lake Balaton has receded since.
00:41:15The island disappeared generations ago, but the castle still stands.
00:41:27It's name means sea eye.
00:41:31A lake buried inside Meijer Hill.
00:41:34But the mountain never made it.
00:41:41Tengersum is one of Hungary's most unlikely landscapes.
00:41:50For centuries, workers carved millstones from the volcanic rock beneath their feet.
00:41:57When the quarry was abandoned, rain slowly reclaimed what people had left behind.
00:42:08Today, cliffs nearly 70 meters high surround the water,
00:42:13hiding a landscape that barely existed a century ago.
00:42:21In 2011, Hungarians voted it the country's most beautiful natural site.
00:42:30People began it.
00:42:32The time finished it.
00:42:41Before Budapest existed, Eshtergom was Hungary's capital.
00:42:48For over two centuries, every decision that shaped the kingdom was made on this stretch of the Danube.
00:43:01The city never stopped being important.
00:43:05It became the center of the country's entire Catholic Church instead,
00:43:10a role it still holds today.
00:43:17From the river, Eshtergom seems to point almost entirely toward one building.
00:43:25The dome catches the light from almost anywhere along the river,
00:43:30making the basilica impossible to miss.
00:43:37This is Eshtergom Basilica, the largest church in Hungarians.
00:43:47In 1552, fewer than 2,000 defenders held these walls against an Ottoman army of 40,000 for 38 days.
00:44:03Legend says they drank so much red wine during the siege,
00:44:07that the Ottomans believed it was bull's blood giving them supernatural strength.
00:44:17Today, Dobo Square still bears the name of the captain who led the defense.
00:44:25The Minerite Church of St. Anthony rises above a city the siege built.
00:44:30One legend at a time.
00:44:39In the town of Heves, something underground refuses to cool.
00:44:48Almost everyone who visits is here for one thing, and it isn't the town.
00:44:59Right in the center, surrounded by a protective ring of forest,
00:45:04is the world's largest biologically active natural thermal lake.
00:45:14Nearly 40 meters below, a spring continuously feeds it,
00:45:19replacing all of its water every two to three days.
00:45:25Even through the coldest winters, the lake remains warm enough to enter.
00:45:35The bathhouse at its center was first built in 1795.
00:45:42It has been expanded, rebuilt, and restored ever since, but always in wood,
00:45:50as though it still belongs to the lake beneath it.
00:45:58There are only two lakes on earth like this.
00:46:02Lake Heves, Lake Heves, is the only one where people can swim.
00:46:13Váts has stood on the eastern bank of the Danube for more than a thousand years,
00:46:18one of Hungary's oldest riverside towns.
00:46:27At its heart lies the country's only triangular Baroque square,
00:46:33where colorful facades have framed daily life for centuries.
00:46:40In 1994, renovation work uncovered a sealed crypt holding 262 naturally mummified bodies,
00:46:49preserved for more than 200 years.
00:46:57Most travelers heading north rush past Váts without stopping.
00:47:02The ones who don't discover a town that has quietly kept its stories to itself.
00:47:1317 times in 200 years, Vesprim Castle changed hands.
00:47:25Each side took it, held it, and eventually lost it to the next.
00:47:35Through all of that, one tradition never broke.
00:47:42This was the only place in the country where a queen of Hungary could be crowned.
00:47:51It earned the town a name that outlasted every siege.
00:47:56The city of Queens.
00:48:03Beneath the cliffs of an abandoned mine lies Hungary's deepest lake.
00:48:1360 meters deep at its darkest point,
00:48:17Rutabana Mine Lake glows in impossible shades of turquoise and emerald.
00:48:27This was Hungary's only surface iron mine,
00:48:31worked for over a century before it closed in 1985.
00:48:37But the greatest discovery here was never the iron.
00:48:4610 million years ago, an ape lived on this land.
00:48:51Its bones now rewrite theories about when humans first stood upright.
00:49:03Its own people burned Jor to the ground rather than let the enemy have it.
00:49:12What stands today was rebuilt from that ash.
00:49:21Baroque towers and pastel facades rise where three rivers meet,
00:49:27almost halfway between Budapest and Vienna.
00:49:36Just south of the city, on a hill overlooking the countryside,
00:49:42stands something that occupation never managed to erase.
00:49:49Paninhalma Arc Abbey has stood since 996,
00:49:53the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in Hungary.
00:50:02Its library holds hundreds of thousands of volumes,
00:50:07including the earliest surviving written record of the Hungarian language.
00:50:16While Jor rose from its ashes, Paninhalma never had to begin again.
00:50:28Mishkolt sits at a border nature never smoothed over,
00:50:32forest on one side and flat plain on the other.
00:50:42Most of what's built here exists because of a disaster.
00:50:51In 1878, a flood tore through the city
00:50:55and destroyed its old historic core almost entirely.
00:51:01What rose in its place was different.
00:51:07Wide streets, eclectic and secession-style buildings,
00:51:12and a downtown built from scratch.
00:51:19One thing the flood never touched still stands at the city's edge.
00:51:25D'Osh Dior Castle, a royal residence favored by King Louis the Great.
00:51:36Six different queens receive this castle as a wedding gift,
00:51:40earning it a name that's stuck ever since.
00:51:44The Queen's Castle.
00:51:50It was rebuilt from the ground up,
00:51:53restored so completely that it looks closer to new than like a ruin.
00:52:04From Avos Hill, the town feels peaceful.
00:52:08But beneath that calm are nearly 900 wine cellars.
00:52:14The one thing that survived every version of Mishkolt's.
00:52:25In 1676, a baby was born inside these walls,
00:52:30who would grow up to lead Hungary's most famous war for independence.
00:52:40Deep in the Zemplane Mountains,
00:52:44Røget's castle sits on a volcanic hill 625 meters high.
00:52:54It was originally built by the Abba family at the turn of the 14th century,
00:52:59but its golden age came later under the Rakotsi family.
00:53:04The same family that gave Hungary, Francis II Rakotsi.
00:53:13In 1686, imperial forces demolished the castle,
00:53:19years before Rakotsi ever raised an army against them.
00:53:26Only ruins remain today.
00:53:28The man born inside them still gets remembered.
00:53:32The walls that watched it happen don't.
00:53:39In the far western corner of Hungary,
00:53:43Chopron sits close enough to Austria
00:53:45that nobody was entirely sure which country it belonged to.
00:53:54After World War I, the town was given a choice.
00:53:58And in 1921, its people chose Hungary.
00:54:08The old city center still traces that same shape.
00:54:12Narrow medieval streets circling a core that survived fires, empires, and shifting borders.
00:54:26Rising 61 meters above it all,
00:54:29the Firewatch Tower once had a guard around the clock.
00:54:34But in 1676, a fire found the town anyway,
00:54:39and the tower rose again.
00:54:46Built into its base is the Gate of Loyalty,
00:54:50marking the vote in stone that gave Chopron its name.
00:54:59Most towns don't get to choose what they are.
00:55:03This one did.
00:55:04And it's been quietly proud of it ever since.
00:55:07It's been the 12th place of the Rocks Oslo-K quick-women now.
00:55:07And they're hadi-e-mys.
00:55:08The 5th is the 9th place of the mind.
00:55:09It's been the 8th place of the state to capture the work.
00:55:09It's been the 7th place to capture the memory,