Ferencváros, the ninth district, has spent two decades remaking itself, and this walk threads the best of the result: a café street, an Art Nouveau landmark, and the river where old warehouses became a whale. Do it towards evening, when Ráday utca fills its tables and the glass on the embankment catches the last of the light.
Start down Ráday utca, pedestrianised and lined with bars and small galleries, drifting south to the leafy calm of Bakáts tér and its twin-towered church. Then the Iparművészeti Múzeum — Ödön Lechner's green-tiled Art Nouveau pile, long under wraps but worth reading from the pavement for the roofline alone.
The river is the payoff. Bálna Budapest, the Whale, fuses brick customs warehouses under a sweeping glass shell; walk its terrace at dusk and look across to Gellért Hill from the bank below. End inland in the rebuilt squares of Corvin-negyed, young and loud, with a drink and the M3 to see you off.
