Experience the best of Szentendre

Szentendre sits on a bend of the Danube, about 20 kilometres north of Budapest, a town of cobbled lanes, pastel baroque houses and church towers. Serbian merchants and refugees settled here from the late seventeenth century and built Orthodox churches that still stand, their iconostases glowing with gold. An eighteenth-century stone cross rises on the main square, Fő tér.

Artists settled here in the 1920s, and the town is full of small galleries and museums, including one devoted to the ceramics of Margit Kovács. On the outskirts, the Hungarian Open-Air Museum rebuilds villages from across the country, with farmhouses and churches. The wooded Danube Bend continues north to the hilltop citadel of Visegrád and the great basilica at Esztergom.

Lángos, fried dough with sour cream and cheese, fish soup, chimney cakes dusted with sugar and cinnamon, and plenty of strudel appear in the cafés along the waterfront. Boats call in summer, and weekdays outside the season are calm.