Vajdahunyad Castle

Where it sits. Vajdahunyad Castle stands on an island in the boating lake of Városliget, Budapest's City Park, immediately behind Heroes' Square at the top of Andrássy Avenue. Two bridges connect it to the park. From the shore it presents an implausible skyline — a Romanesque apse next to a Gothic gate tower next to a Renaissance loggia next to a Baroque wing — and the effect at first sight is of a castle assembled by someone who could not choose. That is exactly what it is, and the incoherence is the design brief rather than an accident.

Built for a birthday party. In 1896 Hungary staged an enormous Millennium Exhibition to mark a thousand years since the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian Basin. Among the pavilions was a building intended to demonstrate the whole history of Hungarian architecture in one structure, designed by Ignác Alpár, who drew on details from more than twenty landmark buildings across the historic kingdom. Its Gothic section copies the Hunyadi castle at Vajdahunyad in Transylvania, now Hunedoara in Romania, and gave the whole complex its name; the Romanesque portion reproduces the celebrated carved portal of the abbey church at Ják; other elements quote Transylvanian and Upper Hungarian towers and gables. The exhibition version was built in wood, plaster and cardboard and meant to be temporary. The public liked it so much that between 1904 and 1908 it was rebuilt in brick and stone as a permanent structure.

What is inside. The building houses the Hungarian Agricultural Museum, founded in 1896 and the largest institution of its kind in Europe, with collections on farming, forestry, viticulture, fishing and hunting spread through the Baroque wing. It is a better museum than its slightly dutiful subject suggests, particularly the historic tools and the wine-making displays, and the interior gives access to rooms and staircases that repay the ticket on their own. Outside the entrance sits Miklós Ligeti's hooded bronze of Anonymus, the unnamed chronicler of King Béla whose Latin history is a foundational and much-argued source for early Hungarian history; the statue was unveiled in 1903, and the pen in his outstretched hand is polished gold by generations of students touching it for luck.

On screen. The castle's borrowed-Gothic silhouette has made it a fixture of Budapest's location industry. NBC's Dracula used it as the count's castle across the 2013 series. Paul Feig's Spy dressed it as Paris in 2015, and Inferno used it a year later to stand in for Italy. Ang Lee's Gemini Man shot here, as did Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey. Netflix's The Witcher brought its first-season unit into the castle at the end of March 2019, during the Budapest block that produced most of the season's interiors — the production has never publicly identified which fictional location the building supplied, and the crew photographs from the shoot show equipment going in through the courtyard rather than anything of the set. The appeal for producers is obvious: four architectural periods, no genuine heritage fabric older than 1904, and a city park address twenty minutes from the studios.

The park around it. The castle is one element of a remarkable concentration. Immediately west is Heroes' Square with the Millennium Monument and the Museum of Fine Arts; north-west is the Széchenyi Thermal Bath of 1913, a neo-Baroque complex whose outdoor pools stay open through winter with steam rolling off them; and the lake in front of the castle serves as a boating pond in summer and freezes into the Városliget rink, in operation since 1870 and among the largest outdoor ice rinks in Europe. Skating there at dusk with the castle floodlit behind is the single best-known image of the place, and it costs less than most museum tickets.

Getting there and timing. The M1 metro — the yellow line, opened in 1896 for the same Millennium celebrations and the oldest underground railway on the European mainland — runs directly from the city centre to Hősök tere and Széchenyi fürdő stations, either of which puts you at the gate. The courtyard is free to enter and open long hours; the museum charges and closes on Mondays. Spring and early autumn are the pleasant seasons, summer weekends the busiest. The bridges and courtyard are level enough for wheelchair users, but the museum's historic floors involve steps and the upper galleries are awkward. Allow an hour for the exterior alone, more if the light is doing something interesting on the lake.