Audioguides Miskolc

Miskolc is Hungary's third-largest city and one that often gets overlooked in favour of Budapest and the wine towns of Eger, which is a shame because it has one of the most unusual attractions in all of Europe. In the suburb of Miskolctapolca, a thermal bath has been built inside a natural cave system, where 30-degree water floods caverns and grottos carved into the hillside, creating a subterranean swimming experience found nowhere else on the continent. The cave bath opened in its current form in 1959, though the thermal springs had been used for centuries before, and arriving at the entrance while steam drifts from cave mouths in the hillside gives the whole experience an otherworldly quality.

The city has a more conventional attraction in Diosgyor Castle, a 14th-century royal fortress in the Bukk foothills that was rebuilt by King Louis the Great and served as the residence of six Hungarian queens, earning it the nickname the Castle of the Queens.

The Bukk National Park behind the city is an expanse of beech forest and limestone plateau with excellent hiking and some of Hungary's most significant cave systems. Miskolc's industrial past in steel and iron is still written into its topography, with the former ironworks at Diosgyor now repurposed as a cultural venue, giving the city a character that is visibly working-class, proud, and unpretentious.