THE BRIDGES
The Bridges of Budapest: A River History
For centuries Buda and Pest had no permanent link. The story of the crossings you sail beneath, from the 1849 Chain Bridge to the rebuilt spans of today.
Check dates and availability ↗Before the bridges: two towns, one river
For most of their history Buda and Pest were separate towns staring at each other across a wide, fast, ice-prone river. Crossing meant a ferry in summer or a rickety pontoon bridge that had to be dismantled when the Danube froze or flooded, and in a hard winter the two sides could be cut off from each other for weeks. The lack of a permanent link was more than an inconvenience; it kept the towns apart economically and socially. The bridges you now sail beneath are therefore not just handsome engineering but the very things that turned two towns into one capital, and each was a landmark event when it opened. Reading the river as a line of bridges is one way to read the city's whole modern history.
The Chain Bridge, the first permanent crossing
The breakthrough came with the Szechenyi Chain Bridge, opened in 1849 and named for Count Istvan Szechenyi, the reforming aristocrat who championed it after being unable to cross the river to reach his dying father. It was designed by the English engineer William Tierney Clark and built under the supervision of the Scottish engineer Adam Clark, who happened to share a surname, and it spans 375 metres between two stone gateways, guarded by carved lions at each end. As the first fixed bridge across the Danube here, it did what no ferry could: it made Buda and Pest a single working city, paving the way for their official unification in 1873. It remains the most beloved and most photographed of all the crossings.
The bridges you pass, at a glance
Between them, the central bridges tell the story of Budapest across more than a century, from the confident boom of the nineteenth century through wartime destruction to patient postwar rebuilding. The dates below are for the original openings, and they are worth reading as a timeline of the city itself. Several of these bridges were destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt afterwards, some quickly and some only decades later, so what you sail beneath today is often a faithful reconstruction rather than the first structure. Each still carries the character of its era, from ornate ironwork to clean modern cables, which is half the pleasure of picking them out from the water.
| Bridge | First opened | Character on the water |
|---|---|---|
| Margaret Bridge | 1876 | Angled bridge that bends at Margaret Island, with a spur onto it |
| Chain Bridge | 1849 | Stone gateways and chains, guarded by lions; the classic view |
| Elizabeth Bridge | 1903 | Slim white cable-stayed span, rebuilt in the 1960s after the war |
| Liberty Bridge | 1896 | Green Art Nouveau ironwork topped with mythical turul birds |
Margaret, Elizabeth and Liberty
Each of the other central bridges has its own face. The Margaret Bridge, opened in 1876 to a French design, is unusual for bending in the middle, where a short spur drops down onto Margaret Island mid-river. The Elizabeth Bridge, named for the popular Empress Elisabeth, is the slender white cable-stayed span near the foot of Gellert Hill; the original opened in 1903, was destroyed in the war and was rebuilt in a modern form in the 1960s. The Liberty Bridge, opened in 1896 for Hungary's millennium celebrations, is the shorter green one, all decorative Art Nouveau ironwork, crowned at each end by figures of the turul, a mythic bird from Hungarian legend. Lit at night, the three make a very different impression from the grand Chain Bridge.
Destroyed and rebuilt: the war on the river
There is a sombre chapter to every Budapest bridge. In the winter of 1944 to 1945, as the front closed in, retreating German forces blew up all the city's Danube crossings, dropping every one of them into the river and severing Buda from Pest once more. The Chain Bridge reopened, rebuilt, in 1949, a century almost to the day after it first opened; the others followed over the following years and, in the case of the Elizabeth Bridge, decades. So when you glide beneath these spans lit up at night, you are looking at survivors and reconstructions, monuments to the city's habit of rebuilding itself. It is worth a quiet thought as you pass, because the river carries harder memories too, a little way downstream on the Pest bank.