We call it Várnegyed in Hungarian. On top of the cca. 70 meters tall Castle Hill the Castle district can be found which is famous for having baroque and neo-classical houses, churches and public buildings and cute cobble stone streets.If you take a walk in the Castle District of Buda you can feel like you’re walking around in a different city than the rest of Budapest for a few hours. The quarter belongs to the 1st district of Budapest. Getting up to the top of the hill is easy: one can do it either by foot (it takes about 10 minutes with a convenient pace), public transportation (bus number 16) or by the Castle Hill Funicular. The Castle district has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1987.

The current Castle hill was inhabited after a Mongolian invasion in 1241-42 and in the 14th century it had about 8000 inhabitants. One of our most important kings, Béla the IV. (who is also called the second state founder after Saint Stephen (1000-1038), the first king of Hungary) was the one who ordered the construction of a defensive castle on the hill next to the river Danube on the Buda side after the mentioned Mongolian invasion. Nowadays not much of the original castle complex can be seen, since Hungary went through many occupations and liberations during the last centuries.

The Castle district has a royal part (southern part) and a historical residential part (on the north). In the Royal part you can admire the Royal Palace, the Sándor palace which can be also called the Hungarian White house, it is the office of the president of Hungary. Next to it the final stop of the Castle hill funicular and the Turul statue can be found. The Turul is a mythological bird of the ancient Hungarian tribes that came from the Ural Mountains and settled down in the middle of Europe in 896. In the historical residential part of the Castle district visitors can see medieval, baroque and neo-classical houses, churches and public buildings and little cobble stone streets. Some of the main attraction of the city, the Matthias Church, the Fisherman’s Bastion, the Hospital in the Rock Museum (hospital and atomic bunker during the second World War and then the Communist dictatorship) and the Labyrinth. Under the hill there is a series of limestone caves and a tunnel system carved out by natural thermal springs. Some of these are museums and cellars like the Labyrinth and the Hospital in the Rock.