In the sharp homeland of the Visegrád forest wreath

 Itinerary

• From Szentgyörgypuszta, follow the K◼ trail through the Áprily Valley to the Mogyoróhegy Restaurant.
• After the restaurant, turn left onto the K▲ trail, climbing to Nagy-Villám.
• From Nagy-Villám, descend back to the parking lot on the K▲ trail.
• Turn right onto the K trail, which you follow until the branch before the Fellegvár reception building.
• Turn right onto the KL trail.
• Turn right onto the K+ signs.
• Before Görgey-bérc, turn left onto the K↺ trail, which you follow to the parking lot.
• At the parking lot, cross the road to the left and follow the PT trail to the far side of the ski slope.
• Turn left onto the K↺ trail, remaining on it until the branch at the memorial poles.
• At the Foresters' Friendship Park (memorial poles), turn left and head back on the K▲ trail, which leads to the end of the route.

Detailed description of the hike

In the footsteps of Áprily

Our hike begins with our backs to the Danube; initially, we follow the K◼ trail between houses. We are immediately engulfed by the narrow valley, where a memorial plaque stands in our path.

“Szentgyörgypuszta. Below a stream, above a field.

Here I withdrew from all vanity.

Sooner the future speaks to me less

and my past sings more beautifully.”

The plaque shows verses from Lajos Áprily's poem Solitude—he spent the last decades of his life here, at the mouth of the valley later named after him. After a Danube boat trip, he took a walk nearby and liked the valley then known as Nagyvillám meadows. His eyes saw a very different picture: treeless sheep pastures and some fruit trees covered the steep, long valley sides, under which flowed a well-watered stream. Shortly after, he revisited the site with his son, Dr. Endre Jékely—they spent the night at the Gondűző Csárda, now a pizzeria, where they found out whose house it was. Áprily eventually bought it from its Kisoroszi owners, and hence Szentgyörgypuszta, part of Visegrád, instantly became an important location in Hungarian literary history. The poet supposedly found a picture of his Transylvanian home in the Visegrád landscape—as shown by his poem Epitaph:

“He came from a forest wreath, carried far

the long road from Házsongárd below.

Instead of Transylvania, he found here

the forest wreath of Visegrád.

His sharp homeland, where he was born,

thus greeted him: Ave, newborn.

The valley of Visegrád thus: Ave, dead -

and gave a grave to his tormented body.”

Today, the dark Áprily valley is covered by beech forest, with large quarries hidden on our right by vegetation. (According to Endre Jékely's recollections, they saw only a wild rocky ridge on the mine wall when they bought the house and only later learned from locals that these were privately owned, possibly restartable quarries. He believed the valley remained uninhabited due to noise from mining related to construction in Vác.) As we venture further along the stream, the bed narrows, often bordered by somber rock ridges, and the slopes appear much larger than their modest heights due to their steepness. Unfortunately, flowing water is now mostly visible only during flash floods, but the scenery remains captivating. The valley has been accessible since 2005; before that, a closed game reserve occupied the area. Shortly after, it joins a side valley with a rocky mouth and smaller rapids—likely the spot Áprily often walked to, calling it Kétág Nose because near his Parajd home, two streams joined at Kis-Küküllő, resembling this sight.

We follow a wide forestry road along the constantly deeply carved stream bed, sometimes narrowing to a rocky corridor; the mild ascent becomes steeper when we turn away from the water. After a short climb, deep in the dark forest, we come upon the small St. Michael forest chapel: the area was not always dominated by forest, as previously a forester's hut stood here. On its ruins, in the 1970s and partly based on Imre Makovecz's plans, a chapel was built by workers from Mogyoróhegy's tourist buildings during their free time. Later vandalized, it was revived in 2017 by students (and helpers) of the Architect Camp under Makovecz’s patronage, who reconstructed it.

At the Mogyoró-hegy resort

We climb out to the gallery-like plateau of Mogyoró-hegy via a charming side path on the valley slope rim. After a wide left bend, we pass a spacious meadow with a playground and reach the forest wildlife park. It's worth exploring as it shows typical habitats, and representatives of the forest's big game (e.g., mouflons, deer) eye us suspiciously from large enclosures.

As we leave the trees, the surprising Mogyoró-hegy Restaurant building introduces a series of structures on the plateau designed by Imre Makovecz. This pioneer of Hungarian organic architecture was chief architect of the Pilis Park Forestry at the end of the 1970s. Since the forestry-educational development of Mogyoró-hegy, his striking buildings seem to 'pop out' from behind groups of trees. (From the meadow beside the restaurant, peaks near the High Börzsöny are visible over the treetops.)

We don’t walk long along the road as we turn left on the K▲ trail. To the right rises the “house growing out of the ground,” the House of Forest Culture, part of the Madas László Forestry Forest School, the oldest forest school in the country (and reportedly in Europe). Apart from many architectural peculiarities, its complex symbolism includes orientation: the axis of its two main entrances faces the rising sun exactly at the spring equinox on March 21. It is named after László Madas, the founder and influential director of the Pilis State Forestry, who made invaluable contributions to nature conservation in the hills around Budapest, tourist infrastructure in Pilis and Visegrád Mountains, and modern forest management.

We circle the wooden houses of the Jurta camping and turn to the base of the Nagy-Villám ski slope. Here, the low elevations are counterbalanced by surprising steepness, while in the opposite direction, Börzsöny spreads out like a magnificent mass. The hiking trail reenters the forest, following a wide promenade with a gentle ascent along the mountainside. Above us, the cables of a canopy course flash until we begin a strenuous climb to the left at a fork. We arrive in a beech forest at the parking lot, from where we take the connecting road to the summit. To the left, a fantastic, upscale restaurant nestles among the trees. Built in the 1930s as a tourist house by the Budapest Doctors' Hiking Association, this high-standard complex fell into disrepair after World War II, managed by the Tourist House Management Company along with others. Renovated in the 1970s during mountain development, it now offers spectacular views.

The world of Nagy-Villám

A turn on the steep road brings us face to face with the massive neorenaissance-style bastion of the Zsitvay Lookout. From its top opens one of the country's most beautiful views: the Danube Bend's breathtaking, sweeping panorama. One way, the wooded, sometimes sharply contoured outline of the Visegrád Mountains rises, with the Danube’s winding ribbon at its foot. In a picturesque setting, the Visegrád Fellegvár castle sits like a sprawling eagle’s nest above the river. “We can look across" the Danube Bend too: the segments before and after the horseshoe-shaped bend gleam, so we see exactly where the mountains greet and then release the river. In the opposite direction, Börzsöny rises like the most noble forest ranges of the Carpathians. The heights appear much higher than reality because Nagy-Villám’s modest size still notably “lifts” it from the Danube shore, while opposite Börzsöny dominates over 800 meters higher. Although we observe it from a higher altitude compared to the former, we look from a lower position relative to the latter. The mountains wave stepwise up to Csóványos, almost reverently raising Budapest's highest peak in the region. In the distance, if the air is not too hazy, the silhouette of the Mátra mountains is also visible.

The lookout was built in the 1930s as part of wide-ranging tourist development touching the entire small mountain group, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Hungarian Tourist Association. At the opening, the top floor was still missing due to lack of coverage, but this did not dampen enthusiasm: thousands arrived (partly on special boat trips organized for the event) to admire the tower. A key consideration was for its design to harmonize with the Visegrád Fellegvár and the exterior of the Salamon Tower.

Descending from the lookout, it is also worth walking out to the top of the ski slope (which can be a substitute for the tower if it is closed). From here, the disturbing steep break-off of the hill and the entire mass of Börzsöny open up. We descend back to the parking lot and turn right onto the K trail. This comfortable promenade crosses the steep slope with switchbacks, passing small valley niches; through the wind-torn beech trees’ thickets, we look out to the opposite hills. After a long, pleasant trudge and a short but slippery descent, the reception buildings of Fellegvár castle appear. Our hike turns right onto the KL trail, which follows a narrower path transecting the hill’s Danube-facing slope. We lose some elevation before joining the K+ marked hiking trail. Turning right, we ascend gently over the same slope, but now in the opposite direction. We cross the steep valley again, and at a fork turn left onto the K↺ trail. To the left, the ancient silhouette of the castle appears high up, but opposite us blocks the way a sizeable dark block of andesite. On its far side, a memorial plaque indicates it is a Görgey memorial site, as the elderly general lived in Visegrád in his last years. We continue on the forestry educational trail and soon reach a parking lot.

Around Kis-Villám

From here, we cross left over the road where the well-trodden path leads along the signs of the Mogyoróhegy educational trail (also look for the PT signposts on direction boards). From a larch meadow, we look down onto the Danube Bend and the mist-guarded castle walls above it. The track turns right and crosses a panoramic (bench-equipped) meadow and then exits on the far side of a narrow forest strip onto the grassy back of Kis-Villám. To the right, the mountain’s bigger sibling with its ski slope comes into view. We cross the open terrain and re-enter the forest. The educational trail beckons right and forks, from where the K↺ signs lead left onwards. We leave a grass pasture and reach the Foresters' Friendship Park established in 1975. Here, the memorial poles representing the country’s foresters and forestry education institutions were erected. From here, we switch left to the K▲ trail, which turns downward in the opposite direction and offers another viewpoint of Börzsöny. Our serpentine promenade bypasses the Boglárka spring, where we say farewell to Mogyoróhegy, and start a steep left-hand descent to the Danube.

Under the quarries

Through dense forest on an increasingly steep slope, the path leads down along the Dorottya spring’s water. It passes under overgrown quarries, finally goes under a strange vaulted bridge. Ahead, two strange huts protrude from the ground. In the early 1980s, several architects and architecture students made hikes here, giving rise to the idea of the Architect Camp led by Imre Makovecz held annually in the quarry yards beside our trail. Many of their works are now destroyed, but some, like the “theater” or the earth hut, can still be seen today.

As we go further on the path, the noise of cars grows meter by meter, but before reaching the road, we turn left. Under another abandoned quarry, at the steep hillside base, squeezed between the highway and the Danube, we arrive at the bus stop, where our hike ends.