Budapest’s Bath Houses

This piece originally appeared in our Spring 2023 print issue. Photographs and Words by Chris Wallace.

Budapest, Hungary, has to be one of the most exciting architectural cities in the world. In part because it is so resistant to renovation, reinvention. The Belle Époque really was an expansive time for the city, when the piles of treasure that had been paid in taxes to the Austrian Empire were (after the 1867 Austro-Hungarian compromise) freed up to be spent at home. The eclectic styles of the buildings that rocketed up with this cash—incorporating Neoclassical, Gothic and Renaissance references, often in a single structure, and from one floor to the next—contain incredible optimism and local pride, and created a singular fantasia of the cityscape. That pride and public spirit meant that many of these grand oddities were built as cathedrals of performance, conversation, and recreation: theaters, coffee houses and, taking advantage of the geothermal activity, public baths. They became great palaces for communal reverie: in stimulation, comfort, inspiration and relaxation.

For my money, there is nothing more romantic, more beautiful, than a grand old building, an ecstatic aesthetic statement, allowed to weather, to crumble a bit, and patina just so. The great Gellért hotel and baths, built in 1918 on a spring that had been a bath site since at least Ottoman times in the 1200s, is my favorite iteration of this. From the swoopy Art Nouveau barrel-vaulting of the spaces to the fairytale tableaux in the baths made with the famous Hungarian Zsolnay porcelain, to the cozy, wood-paneled locker rooms, every vignette in the place feels like a Wes Anderson set. And the cinematic analogy is hard to escape, all down the Danube, on the traditionally tonier and more mountainous Buda side, where these springs have been harnessed for public baths going back hundreds and even thousands of years—and have, uniformly, been left to become period pieces.

Across the river, in the city park, the sprawling Széchenyi thermal baths may be the most famous public bath house…well, anywhere. Unlike the ancient bath sites in Buda, this Neo-Baroque, 19^th-century domed oval, painted in places a vivid lemon yellow (in startling contrast to the aquamarine waters), was created to divert the hot springs into man-made pools. Surrounded by the park, the zoo, and the massive museums built to host the millennium celebrations of 1896 (a kind of World’s Fair put on to celebrate a thousand years of Hungary, from when, legend has it, the Magyars settled the Carpathian Basin), and fed by two thermal channels, Széchenyi is a sort of all-ages outdoor party at all times of the day. Old men gather to play chess, kids and families come to play, and adolescents meet to flirt and frolic, all while bobbing in the healing, sulfurous waters.

Which you’d expect to be a bit of a challenge for the more introverted among us. Except that all of these bathhouses seem to have been built with the understanding that hot waters, with their billowing curtains of steam, are also great places for the solitary visitor. Every pool I sat steeping or sort of sloppily swimming in, on both sides of the Danube, had plenty of private nooks in which to contemplate the steam, and to simmer in my overheated thoughts on the history of the city above.

Hotels + Stays

Anantara, Budapest
Corinthia, Budapest
Four Seasons Gresham Palace, Budapest
Spirit Hotel Thermal Spa, Sarvar