The Museum of Fine Arts

The museum opened in 1906 in a building by Albert Schickedanz and Fulop Herzog, designed to look like a Greek temple and sized to match the square in front of it. Its core is the Esterhazy collection, bought by the state in 1870, which is why the Spanish holdings are unusually deep for central Europe and include one of the largest groups of El Greco outside Spain. Around that sit Italian, Dutch, Flemish and German paintings, a drawing cabinet, classical antiquities and an Egyptian collection. A long closure ended in 2018 with the reopening of the Romanesque Hall, a vaulted space of painted plaster and casts that had been walled up and used for storage for decades.

What you actually see

• The Spanish rooms - El Greco, Velazquez, Goya and Murillo from the Esterhazy collection.
• The Romanesque Hall - painted vaults and architectural casts, reopened after decades closed.
• The Egyptian collection - coffins, mummy portraits and small bronzes on the lower floor.
• The Renaissance Hall - the reconstructed ceremonial space at the top of the stairs.

When to go

Closed on Mondays. Weekday mornings are the calmest; the big loan exhibitions bring long timed-entry queues at weekends and in school holidays. Two to three hours is realistic for the permanent collection alone. Heroes' Square outside is best photographed early or in the hour before sunset, when the low light picks out the colonnade.

Honest expectations

It is a large museum with a confusing plan, and people regularly miss the antiquities downstairs entirely. Rooms are rotated and closed with little warning, so a specific painting may not be out. The blockbuster shows are crowded and priced separately from the permanent collection. There is nowhere near the museum to sit in shade, and the square bakes in July.

Nearby

Heroes' Square is directly outside, with City Park and Vajdahunyad Castle behind it.