Andrássy Avenue: Six Stations Run Under It, and the Famous One Is the Wrong Stop

Most cities put their showpiece street where the shops are. Budapest put its own on a diagonal that starts beside a Cold War-era bus stop and finishes at a square full of bronze horsemen, then buried a metro line under the whole length so nobody would have to walk it. That last part is the useful bit, and almost nothing written about this boulevard tells you how to use it.

The avenue runs from the Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út end up to Heroes’ Square, roughly two kilometres, and the M1 shadows it the entire way with six stations underneath. Which means you can walk the half that rewards walking and ride the half that does not, provided you know which is which and provided you get off at the right stop. Both of those are easier to get wrong than they sound.

Photo: Mike is Michi, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Opera at number 22, with the M1 entrance at street level.

The station names are not a map of what is above them

This is the thing to fix before you set off. The M1 stations under Andrássy are named after streets and squares, not after the buildings people actually come for, and the one exception makes the trap worse: there is a station called Opera, so everyone assumes the naming works that way throughout. It does not.

Station	What is actually above it
Opera	The Hungarian State Opera House, number 22
Oktogon	The Nagykörút crossing, and the Liszt Academy a short block off the avenue
Vörösmarty utca	The House of Terror, number 60
Kodály körönd	The körönd itself, and the Kodály Memorial Museum at 87-89
Bajza utca	The Hopp Ferenc Asian Art Museum, number 103
Hősök tere	Heroes’ Square, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Műcsarnok

The station a place tells you to use and the station named after it are not always the same, and they disagree more often than you would expect. The House of Terror tells visitors to take the Millennium underground to Vörösmarty utca. The Hopp museum names Bajza utca. Nobody arriving at the station called Opera and walking uphill looking for the House of Terror is going to have a good ten minutes.

One more that catches people who have already learned the line: Vörösmarty utca and Vörösmarty tér are different stations. The tér is the M1’s terminus downtown, at the opposite end. The utca is your House of Terror stop.

The line is worth riding for its own sake anyway. It opened in 1896, it is the oldest underground on the European mainland, and it sits so close to the surface that the stairs down feel like an afterthought. A single ride is 500 Ft, a 24-hour travelcard 2,750 Ft, a 72-hour one 5,750 Ft.

Validate your ticket before you go down, and keep it. Inspection on this line is thorough and unsentimental, it tends to happen right at the platform, and a tourist explaining a good-faith mistake does not get very far. If you expect to use more than two or three stations along the avenue, buy the day pass and stop thinking about it. Our Budapest metro guide covers the rest of the network and the ticket types in full.

If the line itself interests you more than the buildings, the Millennium Underground Museum sits in the Deák Ferenc tér underpass at the bottom of the line, open every day except Monday from 10:00 to 17:00, 1,000 Ft for adults and 500 Ft concession.

Photo: Ymblanter, CC BY-SA 4.0. Opera station, about twenty steps below the boulevard.

Where the avenue is worth your feet, and where it is just a road

Terézváros, the district that owns most of the street, breaks it into three stretches in its own planning handbook, and the breakdown is more useful than any walking route somebody has invented.

Stretch	Length	What it looks like
Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út to Oktogon	844 m	Closed rows of three and four storey blocks, facades hard against the pavement
Oktogon to Kodály körönd	563 m	Apartment palaces, wider road, two and three storeys
Kodály körönd to the Heroes’ Square end	656 m	Villas set back behind front gardens, buildings dropping to two storeys

Read that as an instruction. The first two stretches are the boulevard people mean when they say boulevard, and they are the 1,400 metres worth walking slowly. Past Kodály körönd the buildings step away from the road, the frontage opens out, and what you are looking at is a pleasant residential street with a lot of traffic on it. Walk that last 656 metres if the weather is good and you like villas. Ride it otherwise. There is a station at each end of it and that is not a coincidence.

The condition is uneven and nobody warns you. Some of the palaces along the first two stretches have been restored to the point of showing off. Others have not been touched in decades and it shows in the stonework, sometimes next door to each other. That contrast is the actual character of the street, and it is the reason a certain kind of visitor finds the avenue underwhelming against its reputation. If you arrive expecting an unbroken parade of restored facades you will spend the walk noticing the gaps.

What you can actually get inside

Here is the part every list of things to see on Andrássy skips, because it takes checking. Several of the addresses guides send you to are not open, not there, or not what they were.

Where	Address	Adult	Open
Hungarian State Opera, building tour	Andrássy út 22	12,000 Ft English, 6,400 Ft Hungarian	Daily, English at 13:30, 15:00, 16:30
House of Terror	Andrássy út 60	4,000 Ft, plus 2,000 Ft audio guide	Tue to Sun 10:00-18:00, desk closes 17:30
Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum	Vörösmarty utca 35	3,500 Ft	Weekdays 10:00-18:00, Sat 09:00-17:00, Sun closed
Kodály Memorial Museum	Andrássy út 87-89	3,500 Ft	Mon and Wed-Fri 10:00-17:00, closed Tue. Sat 11:00-14:00 by appointment. Closed 31 Aug to 13 Sept 2026
Hopp Ferenc Museum	Andrássy út 103	Garden free	Building closed until the end of September 2026. Garden Wed to Sun 10:00-16:00
Liszt Academy, guided tour	Liszt Ferenc tér 8	6,700 Ft foreign language, 4,100 Ft Hungarian	50 minutes, mini concert included
Museum of Fine Arts	Hősök tere	5,800 Ft	Closed Monday, last entry 17:00
Műcsarnok	Hősök tere	From 1,800 Ft	Closed Monday

Prices are in HUF, which is what you pay at the counter. Converted at 1 EUR = 363 HUF, the ECB rate on 21 August 2026. Rates move, so treat the converted figures as indicative.

Two corrections worth carrying. The Postal Museum is not on this street. It left Andrássy út 3 back in 2012 and now sits on Benczúr utca, so a guide routing you to number 3 is running on fourteen-year-old information. And the Hopp museum’s building is shut until the end of September, though its garden is open Wednesday to Sunday and costs nothing, which is a genuinely pleasant twenty minutes that almost no visitor finds. Locals use that garden. Tourists walk past the gate.

The Kodály museum is the other one worth checking before you walk up to it. It opens Monday and Wednesday to Friday, 10:00 to 17:00, closed Tuesdays, with Saturday 11:00 to 14:00 by arrangement only. There is no public entrance to find: you press doorbell number 30. Groups of six or more book two days ahead. And it shuts entirely for renovation from 31 August to 13 September 2026.

The Opera: take the tour, or buy a seat?

The building tour runs sixty minutes, costs 12,000 Ft in English and 6,400 Ft in Hungarian, and finishes with a short performance by Opera soloists that is included rather than sold as an add-on. Note that the standard student and senior discounts do not apply to building tours at all, which surprises people who arrive holding a card that works everywhere else in the city.

That English premium is close to double, and it is the number that should make you pause, because there is another way into the building.

What	Cost
English building tour	12,000 Ft
Cheapest performance seat, Category V, restricted view	10,700 Ft
Category IV, Level 3 centre	19,800 Ft
Category I, stalls	59,000 Ft

A real performance in the cheapest seat costs less than the tour of the empty building. One tier up, it costs considerably more. So the advice splits cleanly rather than pointing one way: if you mainly want to be inside the auditorium while it is doing what it was built for, book a Category V seat, accept that you will see part of the stage from the side, and spend the difference on dinner. If you want the staircases, the foyer and the parts of the house an audience never reaches, the tour is the only way to get them and it is fair value at the Hungarian price.

Two things that shift the sum further. Concert and gala nights are often cheaper than standard repertoire rather than dearer, with top stalls seats falling to around 23,600 Ft. And specific Hungarian-repertoire productions carry a 50% discount that takes the cheapest seats to roughly 5,400 Ft. Students get 50% off, but only on Level 3 centre seats.

The Opera also sells a limited number of reduced-price standing places, on sale two hours before evening performances and an hour before matinees, at the box office and online, two per person, restricted view by definition. It does not publish what they cost, so treat that as a cheap option rather than a known one.

Tours pause when there is a performance on, and during rehearsal periods the auditorium comes off the route while the rest of the tour still runs. Online sales open a week out, and the box office sells too, so there is no need to plan this months ahead.

The House of Terror, and the thing to know before you go

Number 60 was the headquarters of the Arrow Cross and then of the state security police, and the museum inside it is about what happened in that building. It is heavy, the sound design and lighting do a great deal of the work, and most people are inside for between one and two hours. Allow the two.

The practical points, in the order they will bite:

• There is no online ticket. None. The museum sells at its own desk and nowhere else, so anything you find being sold in advance elsewhere is not the operator’s. Turn up with a card or cash.
• The cash desk closes at 17:30 even though the museum runs to 18:00. Arriving at 17:40 means you do not get in.
• Monday is closed, which catches people combining it with a Monday at the Museum of Fine Arts, also closed.
• Budget the 2,000 Ft audio guide on top of the 4,000 Ft ticket. The English signage in the rooms is sparse enough that without it you will move through a powerful building understanding a fraction of it. Treat the real price as 6,000 Ft and decide on that basis.

Front-of-house can be abrupt. It is not personal and it is not a reason to skip the place, but a warm welcome is not part of the experience and knowing that in advance takes the sting out of it. If you want the wider historical context first, our House of Terror guide goes deeper than this stop-by-stop does.

Four names, one street, and why the buildings stop matching

The avenue was cut through in the 1870s and was simply Sugárút, Radial Road, until it took the name of Gyula Andrássy in the mid-1880s. Then the twentieth century happened to it. It became Sztálin út in 1950. During the 1956 revolution the signs came down and it was renamed Magyar Ifjúság útja, the road of Hungarian youth, which lasted about as long as the revolution did. From 1957 it was Népköztársaság útja, People’s Republic Road, for thirty-three years. It has been Andrássy út again since 1990.

Four renamings in forty years is not decoration, it is the reason the street reads the way it does. Each regime treated this specific stretch of tarmac as the place to make a statement, which is also why the building at number 60 housed two different secret polices and why there is a museum in it now. The boulevard has been continuously used as an argument about what the country is, and the argument is still visible in which buildings got money and which did not.

The whole avenue, along with the metro under it and the square at the top, went onto the UNESCO list in 2002, as an extension of the Budapest listing made in 1987 for the Danube banks and the Castle Quarter. One listing that grew, not a separate honour, whatever you read elsewhere.

Kodály körönd to Heroes’ Square

The körönd is a circular junction with four sweeping palace facades around it and a Kodály museum in one of them. It is genuinely handsome and it is also, in practice, somewhere people walk through rather than somewhere they go. Nobody arrives at the körönd. They pass it on the way up and register it for four seconds, which is roughly the right amount of attention unless you have booked the museum.

Past it, the villa stretch begins, the Hopp garden appears on the right at number 103, and then the avenue delivers you to Heroes’ Square.

Photo: Suicasmo, CC BY-SA 4.0. The square with the Archangel Gabriel still on the column. The statue came down in late 2024 and the column is currently bare.

The column has no statue on it at the moment. The Archangel Gabriel came down in late 2024 after the steel fastenings inside it corroded and bronze ornaments began working loose thirty metres above a square full of people. It is being restored, and the column is being assessed while the statue is off it. Arriving expecting the famous silhouette and finding a bare column is the single most common surprise this square currently delivers.

There is a consolation and it is better than the original problem. A full-size replica stands in a free exhibition at the City Park Visitor Center, a couple of minutes away, which puts a thirty-metre-high statue at eye level for the first time in a hundred years. Go and look at it. You will never get another chance to see that face from four feet away.

Otherwise the square is exactly as advertised and has one weakness: there is no shade anywhere on it. In July and August it is a stone plate in full sun, and fifteen minutes is a long time. Pair it with City Park behind, which is where the trees are, rather than treating it as a destination on its own. Our Heroes’ Square guide covers who all the horsemen are.

Doing the avenue without paying Andrássy prices

The street is lined with brands charging what a UNESCO address costs them, and none of that is why you came. A few notes on spending here:

• The rooftop at number 39 sits above a former department store and takes you up for the price of a drink, which is the cheapest elevated view on the boulevard. Our 360 Bar review explains the unmarked door, because you will walk past it.
• The Hopp garden at 103 costs nothing and is open Wednesday to Sunday. So does looking up, which is most of what this street is for.
• Coffee is better one street back. The avenue’s cafés price by footfall. Our best cafés in Budapest list has several within a few minutes of the M1 stops and none of them charge boulevard rates.
• The shopping is not the point. If that is what you are after, shopping in Budapest covers where locals actually go.

If you are fitting this into a short trip, the avenue slots neatly into a morning: start at the basilica end, walk the first two stretches, ride the last one, and come out at Heroes’ Square with the park in front of you. Our 36 hours in Budapest itinerary builds that into a full weekend, and free things to do in Budapest covers the version of this walk that costs nothing at all. If you would rather have someone talk you along it, free versus paid walking tours is the comparison to read first.

Photo: Civertan Grafikai Stúdió, CC BY-SA 3.0. The avenue looking toward Hősök tere. This was shot during a street event, so the canopies and barriers along the roadway are not the everyday view.

So how should you actually do it?

Walk from Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út to Kodály körönd, which is about 1,400 metres and the only part where the buildings are the point. Pick one interior and commit to it rather than collecting three: the Opera if architecture is your thing, the House of Terror if history is, and not both in one morning, because the second one will not land. Then take the M1 the last stretch from the körönd to Hősök tere, look at a bare column, walk two minutes further to meet the statue that belongs on it at eye level, and go into the park.

That is a comfortable half day, it costs 500 Ft in transport and one ticket, and it uses the boulevard the way the people who live on it do. The version where you march the full length in the August sun, pay 12,000 Ft to see an empty auditorium and then find the museum shut because it is Monday is also available, and a surprising number of people book it.