Buda Castle Myths & Legends Night Walking Tour Budapest

Zero Kilometre Stone and the walk up Castle Hill

The walk begins at Clark Ádám Square, at the Buda end of the Chain Bridge, beside the Zero Kilometre Stone, a sculpture shaped like a zero that marks the point from which road distances across Hungary are measured. Behind it is the lower station of the Castle Hill funicular, opened in 1870, and above rise the walls of the castle district. If you are wondering how to get to Buda Castle, this square is the classic starting point, by bus, tram or a walk across the bridge.

Instead of taking the funicular, the group climbs on foot along the paths and steps of the hillside, about 15 minutes at an easy pace. Halfway up, at a viewpoint over the river, the storyteller gives the first story of the night, with the lights of Pest and the Parliament glowing across the water. Wear comfortable shoes, as the paths are cobbled and uneven.

The Fountain of the Fishing Children and the Turul bird

At the top of the hill, near the upper station of the funicular, stands the Fountain of the Fishing Children, a small bronze group of children wrestling with a large fish. A few steps away the great bronze Turul spreads its wings over the gate to the palace grounds. In Hungarian legend this mythical falcon appeared in a dream to the mother of the Magyar chieftains and later guided the tribes to their new homeland in the Carpathian Basin.

This is also where travellers who chose not to climb join the group, around 20 minutes after the start. The storyteller uses the moment to introduce the castle's long history of sieges, from the Mongol invasion that led to the first fortifications in the thirteenth century to the great siege of 1686 that ended almost 150 years of Ottoman rule in Buda.

The palace terrace and the Matthias Fountain

The route continues to the terrace in front of the Royal Palace, where an equestrian statue looks out over the Danube and the view takes in the bridges, the river and the city lights of Pest. The palace you see dates mostly from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and was rebuilt after the Second World War; by day it houses the Hungarian National Gallery and the Budapest History Museum.

In the palace courtyard, the Matthias Fountain of 1904 shows King Matthias, the fifteenth-century ruler, returning from a hunt with his hounds and huntsmen. The storyteller tells the legend of the peasant girl who fell in love with the disguised king, and the folk tales of a just ruler who walked among his people unrecognised. Locals say that a coin thrown into this fountain guarantees your return to Budapest.

Matthias Church by night

Walking through the lanes of the castle district, past a small house museum devoted to the art of magic, you reach Matthias Church, the most beautiful church in Budapest. Founded in the thirteenth century and rebuilt in its present neo-Gothic form in the late nineteenth century, it is famous for its roof of colourful glazed Zsolnay tiles and its slender bell tower. During the Ottoman period it served as the city's main mosque, before being restored as a church after 1686.

At night the church is closed, but the floodlit facade and tiled roof are at their most dramatic, and the square in front is almost empty. Here the storyteller turns to the darkest chapter of the evening: the vampire scares that swept the villages of Hungary and its neighbours in the eighteenth century, and how real events, superstition and fear became legend.

Fisherman's Bastion

The walk ends at Fisherman's Bastion, the fairy-tale terrace of white stone built between 1895 and 1902 on the medieval walls. Its seven conical towers represent the seven Magyar tribes that settled the Carpathian Basin, and its name recalls the guild of fishermen who defended this stretch of the walls in the Middle Ages. The panorama over the Danube, the Chain Bridge and the Parliament is the most famous view in Budapest.

Seeing Fisherman's Bastion at night, without the daytime crowds, is one of the best reasons to take this tour, and the terraces are open to walk at any hour. Anyone asking whether Buda Castle is worth visiting at night will have the answer here. Afterwards the guide leads the group back down to the Zero Kilometre Stone, where the walk finishes.