Which two cities were joined to make Budapest?

Buda and Pest, on opposite banks of the Danube, formally merged with Obuda in 1873. They are geologically different places: Buda is hilly and defensible with the castle on the ridge, Pest is flat and was the commercial town, and the character of the two halves is still obvious from either bank.

The city sits on a fault line, which has given it something no other capital has - over a hundred thermal springs producing tens of millions of litres of hot mineral water a day. The Romans built baths here, the Ottomans built more during their 150-year occupation and several of those are still in use, and the grand nineteenth-century bathhouses are municipal facilities rather than tourist attractions.

The twentieth century was brutal to it. Two thirds of the Jewish population of Hungary was murdered, mostly deported to Auschwitz in a matter of weeks in 1944; the siege of Budapest that winter destroyed all seven Danube bridges and much of the city; and the 1956 uprising was crushed by Soviet tanks with thousands killed and 200,000 people leaving the country. The shoes on the Danube embankment - sixty pairs of iron shoes at the water's edge - mark where people were shot into the river.