Széchenyi thermal bath

Budapest is a city of thermal water, and bathing here is a civic habit rather than a luxury. Its largest bath complex stands in City Park on the Pest side: a palace of domes and colonnades where, in the outdoor pools, steam rises off the water on winter mornings and regulars sit in the water over games of chess. Locals call it simply "Szecska".

The building took a long time to be born. The city began thinking about a bath here in 1884 and entrusted the design to Győző Czigler, a professor at the Technical University, who worked on it for more than twenty years but died in 1905 before a stone was laid. Construction finally began on 7 May 1909 under his former colleagues, and the bath opened on 16 June 1913. During planning it had been known as the Artesian Bath; it opened under the name of István Széchenyi, the nineteenth-century reformer. The hot water came from a well almost a kilometre deep, drilled beneath the park by Vilmos Zsigmondy between 1865 and 1875. A second well, completed in 1938, struck water at 77 °C from a depth of 1,256 metres and still supplies the complex.

What the visitor sees is really two buildings stitched together. Czigler's original wing, facing the park, carries the domes; in 1927 Imre Francsek Jr. added the open-air swimming section, three long pools embraced by a semicircular range in a lighter Renaissance manner, with fountains along their sides and statues around the deck. Critics still argue over whether to call the whole neo-Baroque or neo-Renaissance, but everyone agrees on the water theme: stylised sea monsters, shells, fish and mermaids climb the lampposts outside, the façades, the capitals and the tiles. The plan is mirrored, so the same sequence of pools repeats in both wings. Today there are three outdoor and fifteen indoor pools, plus saunas and steam rooms, and the medical side still offers treatments. Year-round opening came only in November 1963; before that the outdoor pools closed for winter, and a steaming pool under snow is now the classic image of the place.

Getting there

The bath is in City Park (Városliget) in Pest, about 1.3 km from the centre of District XIII, and has its own metro station, Széchenyi fürdő. Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD) is about 17 km away.