Art Nouveau tiling, a glass roof and a quieter, more decorative bathing experience than the big one in the park.
The Gellért baths opened in 1918, attached to the hotel of the same name, on a site where medicinal springs had been used since the thirteenth century and where the Ottomans had built a bath of their own. The complex was damaged in the war and rebuilt, and much of what you see is a careful restoration of the original scheme.
It is the most beautiful bathhouse in the city. The main indoor pool sits under a vaulted glass roof on marble columns, with a gallery running around it. The thermal pools are lined in Zsolnay ceramic — the same Pécs factory that did the roof of Matthias Church — in deep blues and greens, with figurative panels and lion-head spouts. The effect is somewhere between a cathedral and a very expensive swimming club of 1918, which is more or less what it was.
The bathing
The thermal pools run at 36°C and 38°C and are the point. The main swimming hall is cooler, around 26°C, and requires a cap. There is an outdoor pool with a wave machine, one of the earliest in Europe, which operates at intervals in summer.
Saunas and steam rooms are included. Massage and other treatments are booked separately, at the desk or online, and are worth arranging in advance in high season.
How it compares
Széchenyi is bigger, louder, more social, and better in winter because so much of it is outdoors. Gellért is smaller, calmer and far more decorative, and the crowd skews older and quieter. Neither is the “real” Budapest bath — both are early twentieth-century inventions.
If you want something genuinely Ottoman, the Rudas and Király baths are the sixteenth-century ones, with octagonal pools under domes pierced with coloured glass. Rudas has single-sex days and mixed days; check before going.
Practicalities
Bring flip-flops, a towel and a cap for the swimming pool, or hire them. Cabins are better than lockers. The entrance for bath visitors is separate from the hotel entrance, around the corner on Kelenhegyi út.
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