Margaret Island

A 2.5-kilometre-long island sits in the middle of the Danube between Buda and Pest, and for most of its history, ordinary people were not allowed on it. Margaret Island was a royal hunting reserve known as the Island of Rabbits, then a convent where King Béla IV sent his daughter Margaret after vowing to dedicate her to God if Hungary survived the Mongol invasion. Hungary survived. Margaret did not particularly enjoy convent life, but the island took her name anyway when it became a public park in 1866.

Today, the island is car-free and devoted entirely to green space, thermal pools, and slow living. The Musical Fountain near the southern end puts on dramatic water shows five times a day, with jets shooting up to 10 metres in the air synchronised to everything from Vivaldi to The Rolling Stones. Near the Japanese Garden in the north, the Bodor Musical Well plays medieval-inspired Hungarian melodies on the hour — a copy of a water-powered fountain built by Transylvanian craftsman Péter Bodor in the 1820s.

The island's medieval ruins are genuinely atmospheric. The thirteenth-century Dominican convent where Princess Margaret lived and died at 28 still has standing walls, and fragments of a Franciscan church and a Premonstratensian chapel dot the landscape. There is also a small zoo, a rose garden with hundreds of varieties, and the Palatinus Strand — an enormous outdoor swimming complex that becomes a local obsession every summer.

Rent a bike or one of those absurd multi-person pedal carts and circuit the island. On weekday mornings, it belongs to joggers and dog walkers. On summer weekends, half of Budapest shows up with picnic blankets.