Heroes' Square and Andrássy Avenue

Andrássy Avenue is the Champs-Élysées of Budapest, a two-and-a-half-kilometre boulevard laid out in the 1870s to link the Inner City with City Park, and it is one of the best walks in the city. It is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its character changes as you go. The first stretch, from Deák Ferenc tér past the Hungarian State Opera, is lined with grand apartment buildings, designer shops and cafés; the middle, around Oktogon and the House of Terror, is busier; and the final stretch is lined with leafy villas and embassies. Under the avenue runs the M1 Millennium Underground, opened in 1896, the oldest underground railway on the European continent, with its tiny yellow carriages and tiled stations, itself part of the World Heritage listing and a ride worth taking for its own sake. At the end of the avenue lies Heroes' Square, the most monumental space in Budapest. The Millennium Monument at its centre was begun for the celebrations of 1896, marking a thousand years since the Magyar conquest. A column topped by the Archangel Gabriel rises above statues of the seven chieftains who led the Magyar tribes into the Carpathian Basin, led by Árpád on horseback, and behind them two curved colonnades hold statues of Hungary's kings and heroes. In front lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The square is flanked by two museums in classical temples: the Museum of Fine Arts, with a major European collection, and the Műcsarnok, the Hall of Art, for contemporary exhibitions. Beyond lies City Park, Budapest's great park, with the romantic Vajdahunyad Castle, a fantasy of Hungarian architecture by a lake that becomes one of Europe's largest open-air ice rinks in winter, the Széchenyi baths, the zoo, and new museums including the House of Music Hungary.

How to do it: walk Andrássy Avenue from the Opera to Heroes' Square in about forty-five minutes at an easy pace, with stops, or ride the M1 one way and walk the other. Start at the Hungarian State Opera, a neo-Renaissance jewel by Miklós Ybl, whose interior can be seen on guided tours, and pause at the Liszt Academy, on a square just off the avenue, a concert hall with a stunning Art Nouveau interior. Continue past Oktogon and the House of Terror to the villa stretch and Heroes' Square. The square is best in the morning for photographs, when the light falls on the monument, and at dusk, when it is floodlit.

City Park: behind the square, cross the bridge to Vajdahunyad Castle, built for the 1896 Millennium Exhibition to showcase architectural styles from across historic Hungary, and now home to the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture. The lake in front becomes a huge ice rink in winter and a boating lake in summer. The park is undergoing a long-term redevelopment, with new museum buildings such as the House of Music Hungary and the Museum of Ethnography, and playgrounds and walking paths. The Széchenyi baths are at the northern edge of the park, a ten-minute walk from the square.

Know the trade-offs. Heroes' Square is a vast, open space, and it can be windswept in winter and baking in summer, with little shade. The avenue's best stretches are the two ends, and the middle can feel busy with traffic. But the combination of the Opera, the avenue, the square, the park and the baths makes one of the best half-days in Budapest, almost all of it free, and the M1 ride is a delightful piece of history in itself.