Bükk

The Bükk is Hungary's most mountainous mountain — no single summit tops the Mátra's Kékes, but nowhere else does the land stay so high for so long. The heart of the range is the Bükk Plateau, a limestone table holding steady above eight hundred metres, rimmed by the bare crags locals simply call the "stones": Istállós-kő, Tar-kő, Pes-kő, a balcony line of cliffs looking south over the Great Plain's haze. The national park, declared in 1977 as the country's third, was the first one drawn around forest — the beech woods that named the range (bükk means beech) cover almost all of it, and it remains the only Hungarian park that is one solid piece of land rather than a mosaic.

What the plateau hides is water's work. The Bükk is Hungary's densest cave country, with well over a thousand recorded caves: the karst drinks every stream at sinkhole rows along the plateau margin and returns them at spring lines below. At Lillafüred the travertine Anna Cave and the dripstone St. Stephen Cave open practically from the hotel terrace, beside a twenty-metre waterfall — the country's tallest — where the Szinva pours over the lip its own deposits built. The caves kept people early: Istállós-kő and the Szeleta cave above Hámor gave Hungarian archaeology some of its defining Palaeolithic finds, bone spearpoints and leaf-shaped blades from hunters who worked these hillsides thirty thousand years ago.

The western gate is gentler. At Szilvásvárad the Szalajka valley runs a string of trout pools up to the Fátyol waterfall, a veil of water descending a staircase of tufa steps, with a forest railway trundling the valley floor and the state Lipizzaner stud in the village keeping four hundred years of carriage-horse bloodlines. Above it all, patches of the plateau forest — the Őserdő reserve among them — have been left uncut for over a century, as close to primeval beech as lowland Central Europe gets. Bélapátfalva's Cistercian abbey of 1232, the only intact Romanesque monastery church in the country, stands under the western cliffs.

What's worth knowing before you go

Eger and Miskolc bracket the range and both work as bases; Szilvásvárad and Lillafüred are the two classic entry valleys, each with its narrow-gauge railway and each mobbed on summer weekends — go midweek or start early. The essential walk is up from the Szalajka valley onto the plateau rim and along the "stones" — the Istállós-kő ascent passes the excavated cave mouth — with the long option of the plateau crossing on the blue-blazed trails. Roads onto the plateau itself are barred to cars, which is precisely its value; the mountain bike network is the local way around. Autumn is the season the Bükk was made for: beech turning over white cliffs, and stag roar carrying up from the valleys in late September. The connoisseur's detail is winter at the plateau's dolines, which trap cold so efficiently they have recorded the lowest temperatures in Hungary — minus thirty-five degrees under clear stars.