Hungary is a landlocked country of 93,030 km² in the Carpathian Basin of Central Europe, bordered by Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. It has three main physical regions. The Great Hungarian Plain (Great Alföld) covers more than half the country east of the Danube. Transdanubia, a region of rolling hills, lies west of the river. The North Hungarian Mountains run along the Slovak border. Most of the country is below 200 m, and land above 300 m makes up less than 2 per cent of it. The highest point is Kékes, 1,014 m, in the Mátra Mountains. The lowest is 77.6 m, near Szeged on the Tisza. The two main rivers are the Danube and the Tisza, and Lake Balaton, at about 600 km², is the largest lake in Central Europe. More than 9.5 million people live there. Five features show how this low, enclosed basin works: a shallow lake, a river forced through a volcano, a peak that became the national summit by treaty, a cave that crosses a border, and a plain that was re-engineered in the 19th century.
Lake Balaton, the ‘Hungarian Sea’ of Transdanubia
Lake Balaton lies in a rift in Transdanubia, southwest of Budapest. It is about 78 km long and only 3 to 14 km wide, and Hungarians call it the Hungarian Sea. Its striking feature is how shallow it is. The average depth is about 3.2 m, so it warms quickly in summer, when the water averages about 25 °C. The lake freezes over in winter, and when the ice holds, visitors skate and ice-sail on it. The Zala River supplies most of its water, and the canalised Sió, which drains southeast towards the Danube, is its only outlet.
The name is old. The Romans called the lake Pelso, and the modern name is derived from a Slavic word, *bolto, meaning mud or swamp. That fits the marshy country along the Zala, where the Slavic prince Pribina built a fortress at Zalavár in 846. The two shores are different. The northern shore is backed by the Balaton Uplands, where Badacsony and its neighbours are basalt buttes left by old volcanic activity. Their volcanic soils and the lake’s mild microclimate have supported vineyards since Roman times. The Tihany Peninsula juts into the lake from the northern shore. Its Benedictine abbey was founded in 1055 by King Andrew I, and the abbey’s founding charter, now kept at Pannonhalma Archabbey, contains the oldest surviving written words in Hungarian. The southern shore is flat, lined with resort towns such as Siófok.
The lake also affects the weather and the economy around it. The area gets about 5 to 7 cm more rain a year than most of Hungary and has milder temperatures. Railways reached the shore in 1861 and 1909. Under state-organised tourism, overnight guests in July rose from 700,000 in 1965 to two million in 1975. Before 1989 the lake was also a meeting place for East and West German families separated by the Berlin Wall. Hungary’s first biological research institute opened on its shore in 1927. Each July, swimmers race 5.2 km across it from Révfülöp to Balatonboglár.
The Danube Bend at Visegrád
The Danube enters Hungary from the west, forms the border with Slovakia past Esztergom, and is navigable for 418 km inside the country. North of Budapest it does something unusual for a lowland river. Near Visegrád it turns sharply south in a tight U-shaped loop, the Dunakanyar or Danube Bend, and cuts between two mountain blocks. The Börzsöny rises on the left bank, reaching 938 m at Csóványos. The Visegrád Mountains are on the right bank, with their highest point, Dobogókő, at 699 m.
The bend is volcanic in origin. The Visegrád Mountains are built mainly of andesite, and geologists explain the loop as the result of a volcanic eruption that covered the whole area about 15 million years ago. A caldera formed around Keserűs Hill, and a lava dome inside it was later worn down. The river now follows the southern edge of that caldera. Officially the Visegrád Mountains are grouped with the Pilis just to the south in the Transdanubian Mountains, which run from the Balaton area to the bend and are built of sedimentary rock. Geologically, though, the Visegrád range belongs with the Börzsöny and the North Hungarian Mountains.
The narrow gap made Visegrád a natural stronghold. Its name is Slavic and means upper castle. King Charles I made it the royal seat of Hungary in 1325. In 1335 he hosted the kings of Bohemia and Poland there for a two-month congress. On 15 February 1991 the leaders of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary met in the same town to found the Visegrád Group. Below the bend the river divides around Szentendre Island before reaching Budapest, where Margaret Island splits it again.
Kékes and the Volcanic Mátra
Hungary’s highest mountain stands in the Mátra, a range between Gyöngyös and Eger. The Mátra is mostly volcanic. It is a layered mass, several hundred metres thick, of Middle Miocene andesite, tuff and volcanic agglomerate formed about 13 to 18 million years ago. That volcanism was driven by the coming together of the two crustal blocks that make up the Carpathian Basin, the Alcapa and Tisza–Dacia blocks, through extension rather than subduction. After the eruptions ended, the land south of the range subsided and the whole range tilted south. The southern slopes are gentle and buried under younger sediments. The northern side is steep and cut by Pleistocene landslides. Carbonated springs, known locally as csevice, rise from older Oligocene clays at its foot.
Kékes, at 1,014 m, became Hungary’s highest summit in 1920. Before the Treaty of Trianon, the highest peak in the Kingdom of Hungary was Gerlachovský štít in the High Tatras, now in Slovakia. Under the 1920 treaty Hungary lost more than 71 per cent of its former territory, including the High Tatras. The summit has the country’s highest weather station. Its average temperature is 6.4 °C, about 5 °C lower than in Budapest. January averages −3.4 °C and August 16.4 °C, and recorded extremes range from −22.6 °C in 1987 to 31.4 °C on 20 July 2007. A 178 m television tower, built in 1980, stands on top beside two ski runs. The resort of Kékestető belongs to the town of Gyöngyös and had just 14 residents at the 2022 census.
The neighbouring Bükk, east of the Mátra, is slightly lower at its highest point, Kettős-bérc at 961 m. Its average height is greater, however, with more than 20 peaks over 900 m. It is built largely of limestone and has 1,115 known caves. Further northeast, the same mountain belt produces Tokaji wine.
Baradla Cave in the Aggtelek Karst
The limestone of northern Hungary holds the country’s best-known cave. Baradla opens at the foot of a white cliff at the edge of the village of Aggtelek, close to the Slovak border. With its Slovak continuation, Domica, it forms a single system of more than 20 km, about a quarter of which lies in Slovakia. The main passage meanders for 7 km. It averages 10 m wide and 7 to 8 m high and widens into halls, one of them large enough to hold 1,000 people. An underground stream runs through it in times of flood. Rainwater dissolving the limestone over a very long time made the passages, and dripping water built the stalactites and stalagmites that fill them. More than 500 cave-dwelling animal species have been recorded, including 21 species of bats.
People have used the cave since the Neolithic. It is first mentioned in writing in 1549, and Joseph Sartory made the first survey in 1794. Tourist paths followed in 1806. In 1825 the engineer Imre Vass explored another 5 km of the main branch and published his map in 1831. The Slovak section, Domica, was found by Ján Majko in 1926. In 1995 UNESCO listed Baradla with more than 1,000 other caves on both sides of the border, over an area of 55,800 ha, as the Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst. The listing cites their unusual mix of karst features formed under both tropical and temperate climates.
The Tisza and the Hortobágy Puszta
East of the Danube, the Great Alföld is drained by the Tisza. The river rises near Rakhiv in Ukraine, enters Hungary at Tiszabecs, crosses the country from north to south and leaves for Serbia just below Szeged, close to Hungary’s lowest point. It joins the Danube at Stari Slankamen after 966 km, draining about 156,000 km². On a plain this flat the old Tisza wandered in great loops and flooded huge areas, so for centuries the Alföld was mostly cattle and horse country rather than farmland.
That changed in the 19th century. Organised by István Széchenyi, the regulation of the Tisza began on 27 August 1846 and was largely finished by 1880. Engineers cut through meanders, leaving 589 km of dead channels and adding 136 km of new riverbed. Drainage and levees then opened the plain to ploughing. A dam at Kisköre, begun in the 1970s, created Lake Tisza for flood control and water storage. The river has also suffered from pollution: in January 2000 cyanide-laden sludge from a Romanian mine killed about 2,000 tonnes of fish.
The Hortobágy shows what the plain was like before the plough. Designated in 1973 as Hungary’s first national park and listed by UNESCO in 1999, its 800 km² make up the country’s largest protected area and the largest semi-natural grassland in Europe. It was once thought to be the result of medieval forest clearance. Scientists now think its alkaline soils began forming about 10,000 years ago, when the Tisza cut off streams flowing from the northern mountains. Grey cattle, racka sheep and Nonius horses still graze here under mounted herdsmen, the csikós. The park has 342 bird species, including the great bustard, and a herd of about 25 Przewalski’s horses. The Nine-holed Bridge and the T-shaped sweep wells stand out on the flat horizon, and mirages appear on hot summer days.
The wider setting of this landscape is covered in our guide to the Pannonian Plain. The Danube itself is followed from source to delta in our complete guide to the Danube. The city that grew where the river leaves the Danube Bend for the plain is profiled in Budapest, capital of Hungary.