Széchenyi Thermal Bath

Where it sits. The Széchenyi bath occupies the northern side of Városliget, Budapest's City Park, at the far end of Andrássy út beyond Heroes' Square, in the 14th district. It is a vast mustard-yellow Neo-Baroque block wrapped around a courtyard of three outdoor pools, and its scale surprises people who arrive expecting a spa rather than a public institution: 6,220 square metres of building, 15 indoor pools and three outdoor ones, and a bathing hall system that has served the city for more than a century. It is the largest medicinal bath in Europe. The zoo, the circus and the Museum of Fine Arts are all within a few minutes' walk, which makes the park corner an unusually dense concentration of Budapest's imperial-era public architecture.

The story behind it. The water came first. Between 1865 and 1875 the engineer Vilmos Zsigmondy drilled 975 metres beneath the park and struck hot water; the bath planned around it was known during design as the Artesian Bath and only took the name of Count István Széchenyi at its opening on 16 June 1913. Győző Czigler designed the Neo-Baroque complex, construction began on 7 May 1909, and the pools alone cost around 3.9 million Austro-Hungarian korona. More than 200,000 bathers came in the first year; by 1919 the figure was 890,507. The 1927 expansion produced the building visible today, and when the original well could not supply the enlarged complex a second spring was found in 1938 at a depth of 1,256 metres, delivering water at 77 °C and some six million litres a day. The chemistry is part of the appeal: sulfate, calcium, magnesium and bicarbonate, plus notable metaboric acid and fluoride. A full restoration ran from 1999 to 2009.

On screen — and a correction. Budapest is one of the most heavily filmed cities in Europe, and its baths are constantly credited with scenes they never hosted. The famous one is the opening of Red Heat (1988), in which Arnold Schwarzenegger's Soviet detective fights naked through clouds of steam: that was shot at the Rudas bath on the Buda side, not here. The rest of that film's Moscow was Budapest too — Buda Castle played the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, the snowbound second half of the opening was filmed in Austria because Budapest had no snow, and the production managed only four days of actual Moscow footage, mostly on Red Square. The city's other doubling work follows the same pattern: Evita (1996) used 23 Budapest locations for Buenos Aires, including two days re-enacting Eva Perón's state funeral with 4,000 extras and exteriors at St Stephen's Basilica, and Blade Runner 2049 built its Las Vegas casino interiors inside the Budapest Stock Exchange palace on Szabadság tér while shooting at Korda and Origo studios from July to November 2016. Széchenyi's own screen life is mostly television, documentary and music video — its fame is genuinely its own.

What you actually see today. The three outdoor pools are the image everyone knows: a cool central swimming pool at 27 to 28 °C with lane ropes, flanked by a thermal sitting pool at around 38 °C and an adventure pool with a circular current channel and jets. The men playing chess on floating boards in the hot pool have been doing so for decades and are not a staged attraction. Indoors, a warren of smaller pools runs from 18 °C plunge basins to 38 °C thermal baths, along with saunas and steam rooms, arranged around corridors of glazed tile, stained glass and mosaic that reward wandering. Bring flip-flops and a towel or pay to rent them; choose between a locker and a private cabin at the ticket desk, and note that the swimming pool requires a cap.

Getting there and timing. The M1 metro — the yellow line, the oldest underground railway on the European continent, opened in 1896 — runs beneath Andrássy út and stops at Széchenyi fürdő, delivering you at the entrance. Doors open early, around six in the morning, and the first two hours belong to local swimmers; from late morning the courtyard fills. Winter is counterintuitively the best season: bathing outdoors at 38 °C with frost on the balustrades and steam hiding the far end of the pool is the single most memorable thing the place offers. Weekend evenings in summer bring the loud, alcohol-fuelled "sparty" nights, which are a very different proposition from an ordinary day ticket. The main halls are reachable step-free with assistance, but the historic layout, changing cabins and pool steps mean access is partial; the operator can advise on the adapted entry points.