Budapest without tourists: what the city looked like in May 2020

An experiment in empty streets

This is not a travel piece in the conventional sense. Nobody was travelling to Budapest in May 2020 — the borders had been closed since mid-March, the tourist industry had effectively ceased, and the city had entered a kind of enforced stillness that was, depending on your disposition, either deeply unsettling or quietly extraordinary.

We had been living in Budapest since 2018, which meant we watched the emptying from the inside rather than from the departures board. What follows is an attempt to describe what the city was like without the infrastructure of tourism — not as an advertisement for visiting under those conditions (obviously), but as a portrait of a place revealed differently.

The ruin bars in silence

District VII — normally Budapest’s most densely trafficked zone by 9 pm on any night of the week — was silent. Not peaceful-at-dawn silent. Silent in the way of spaces built for occupation that are suddenly not occupied. The courtyard of Szimpla Kert was closed. Anker’t was closed. The string lights were still there; the chairs were not.

Walking through Kazinczy utca in the evening that spring was a strange experience. The architecture of the neighbourhood — the grand Jewish quarter tenements, the narrow side streets, the occasional glimpse of an interior courtyard through an open gate — was fully visible in a way it rarely is when the streets are full. District VII has been a historical site its entire life, but you forget that when it is also simultaneously a party destination. In the stillness, the history was more audible.

The Jewish quarter’s heritage — the Dohány Street Synagogue, the memorial garden, the plaques on buildings — had this quality too: more legible without the crowd. People who visit Budapest for the nightlife and pass by these sites without stopping are missing something genuine.

The Danube with no tour boats

The most dramatic visual change was the river. The Danube cruise industry — which runs dozens of boats daily through the tourist season, from one-hour sightseeing trips to full dinner cruises — stopped entirely. For weeks, the river was navigated only by working freight barges and the occasional municipal vessel.

This sounds minor. It was not. The sightseeing boats are part of the visual grammar of the Budapest waterfront in normal times — they appear and disappear constantly, forming part of the texture of any view from the Buda embankment or the bridges. Without them, the river looked as it presumably looked before tourism, which is: enormous, functional, and not particularly interested in being observed.

We crossed the Chain Bridge on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-May. There was almost nobody on it. This bridge, which on a summer tourist day is essentially a moving crowd of visitors photographing each other against the backdrop of the Parliament, held three or four cyclists and two pedestrians in the full thirty minutes we walked across and back. The Pest embankment below was empty. The Hungarian Parliament, usually surrounded by tour groups, had one guard visible from a distance.

What the thermal baths looked like closed

The thermal baths closed in March and did not reopen until later in the summer. Walking past Széchenyi — which sits in City Park, a public space that remained accessible throughout — the building was visibly still. The outdoor pools were locked, visible through iron gates. The steam that normally hangs over the courtyard in cold weather was absent. The building without its function looked, more than anything, like an architectural study: yellow and white, baroque and monumental, suddenly very quiet.

The Gellért baths on the Buda side were the same. The Art Nouveau facade looks best in isolation — when you can see the whole thing without scaffolding or queue ropes — and we took photographs that month that we could never replicate in normal tourist conditions. We are not suggesting this was a fair trade.

The practical economics

The shutdown of tourism hit Budapest’s economy in concentrated ways. The hospitality sector — which had expanded dramatically through the 2010s in direct proportion to visitor numbers — shed jobs rapidly. The restaurant closures were partly mandated and partly voluntary; without tourists, the economics of keeping a central Budapest restaurant open simply did not work.

The city centre’s dependency on tourist spending was more visible in its absence than it had ever been in its presence. Váci utca — normally a reliable indicator of tourist traffic — had no tourists. The souvenir shops, the tourist-priced restaurants, the organised tour operators: all closed. What remained in the central districts were the services that actual residents use: the bakeries, the pharmacies, the small groceries, the corner bars that had not been optimised for Instagram.

It was a useful corrective to any tendency to mistake the tourist version of a city for the city itself. Budapest has a population of around 1.75 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were going to work (or staying home from work) and buying bread and doing ordinary things while the attraction economy was paused.

What came back first

The parks were never empty, even at the height of restrictions. Margitsziget — Margaret Island, the large recreational island in the middle of the Danube — was busy with cyclists and joggers throughout. It is, by some margin, the best park in central Budapest: car-free, long, green, bookended by the thermal baths at one end and a fountain at the other. In normal times it is also full of tourists; in the spring and summer of 2020, it was full of residents. For a sense of what Margaret Island is when it is functioning for its intended audience, that period was instructive.

The outdoor terraces of restaurants opened in late May, cautiously. The first weeks were strange — half-capacity, the tables unusually spread out, menus available only in Hungarian as the printer of the English versions was apparently non-operational. A beer garden in District VI had a queue that was both orderly and enthusiastic in a way that suggested people had been thinking about this specific beer for two months.

The local businesses that survived

Part of what we observed in May 2020 — and on subsequent visits through the rest of that year and into 2021 — was which businesses had the resilience to survive the extended disruption. The correlations were not surprising in retrospect but were stark in practice.

The tourist-only operations — the souvenir shops, the tourist-priced restaurants, the organised tour operators — closed entirely and stayed closed. Most of them reopened when visitors returned; a meaningful percentage did not. The ones that had genuinely low overhead and owner-operator economics (small wine shops, neighbourhood restaurants with regular local clientele, independent bookshops) showed more resilience.

The baths — as essential infrastructure rather than optional tourist amenities — were supported by the state through the closure period. Széchenyi and the other major bath complexes have been under various forms of state or municipal ownership or management, which provided a degree of protection from the pure market consequences of zero visitors.

The ruin bars in District VII fell into a complicated category: Szimpla Kert, which had been explicit about its cultural mission alongside its commercial function, received a degree of community support and survived. Several of the pure-party venues that had opened in the mid-2010s at the peak of the stag-do boom did not reopen.

The neighbourhood perspective

What we saw consistently during the quieter periods of 2020 was a city in which the neighbourhood fabric — the streets that belonged to residents rather than visitors — became more visible. District XIII, north of the Jewish quarter and Margaret Island, is a largely residential district with excellent local restaurants, a Sunday market, and virtually no tourist infrastructure. In normal times it is invisible to most visitors because there is no reason to go unless you know someone who lives there. In 2020 it simply continued: local cafés, local shops, local life.

The Budapest neighbourhoods guide is the reference for understanding the difference between the tourist-facing districts and the residential reality. The where to stay guide notes District XIII as an option for visitors who want a more residential experience at lower prices than Districts V and VII.

What this period means for planning a visit

The answer to “what did I learn from visiting Budapest during the pandemic” is not primarily practical. The practical situation has long since resolved: the baths are open, the tour boats are on the river, Szimpla is full of people on Saturday nights, and the city is operating in its normal tourist-season mode.

What the period demonstrated is that Budapest is a real city with a real population that has been substantially supplemented — and in places reshaped — by tourism, and that the layers are worth distinguishing. The best-time-to-visit guide recommends spring and autumn for a reason: the city is less crowded, the atmosphere is closer to something that belongs to its residents as well as its visitors. The ruin bar scene is more interesting on a Tuesday in October than on a Saturday in August. The thermal baths are quieter on a winter weekday than on a summer afternoon.

There is also, for those who can manage it, value in not overloading a city-break itinerary. The architecture of District VII, the empty Chain Bridge, the Danube without boats — these are not experiences that require a pandemic. They require going out at the wrong hour, or the right hour, and paying attention. The walking tours guide is full of options that work best when you are not in a rush. The free things to do guide is a useful companion for anyone who wants to engage with the city at its own pace rather than through the lens of ticketed attractions.

The city we watched in May 2020 was not a better city without tourists. It was a different city, and the difference was instructive about which parts of what we usually experience are the city and which parts are the city performing itself for visitors. Both versions are interesting. Knowing which is which helps.