Hiking in Hungary: Visit to Regec and Boldogko Castles


Initially published on September 28, 2016
Rapunzel Style Hiking: Visit to Regec and Boldogko Castles

Don’t mind the title of the blog, its just since, well,  Rapunzel lived in a castle and I happened to go on a trip this weekend that required a little bit of hiking to get to the first castle.

It was an early morning trip and I had to run to catch this bus. This was a group hiking tour organised by Interhelp desk and we left Debrecen at 7:20 am.


Visit to Regec Castle Ruins

Our first stop was at Tokaj, yes the famous wine region of Hungary. Drink in the pictures below.

We finally arived to the foot of Varhegy (castle hill) the hill on which stands regec castle at 10:10am. It then took us another 40 minutes to reach the castle, which is why I say we did a little bit of hiking. It was a fun walk up, the terrain was indeed rough, so do wear proper hiking shoes. The weather was great, maybe it’s because of the hiking but almost everyone took off their sweaters for the walk up. The Individual ticket is about 700ft, of course we didn’t have to pay that as the tour agency took care of it.

Ah the castle ruins are amazing, it really makes you wonder how it must have been back in the day. Some parts have been rebuilt, but its also really amazing that you can still see the original old parts of the castle.

They had some items displayed, but not with a story so it was hard to say what we were looking at.

Crowning it all, this castle has amazing panorama views, from like every side Woah!! My camera doesn’t do it much justice.

All in all we spent about 1 hour 30 minutes in the castle and then of course another 40 minutes walking down the hill.

Boldogko Castle

The drive to the Boldogko castle from Regec castle took only about 24 minutes.

Perhaps because its more of a proper castle, there were more people, their souvenir shop had more interesting stuff to look at, Oohh and they have an underground cave restaurant (you can dress in costumes to eat here, this is hearsay information)

It actually does hold a proper museum. Different levels of the castle had different display items

The crowning moment for this castle visit was the top floor museum. They have the largest collection of small lead soldiers in Europe (hearsay info again), pretty impressive. Also the annotations were in English, so you could understand most of the displays.

The museum also had little plays and demonstrations by actors dressed in proper costumes but as you may guess it was in Hungarian.You could try on some of the costumes too, like armor and yes archery. that was fun. You had to pay for the archery, but that was 300ft for shooting 5 arrows. (1EUR) Here we also spent another 1 hour 30 minutes and it was really interesting.

Which is better?

I must say that I loved the regec castle ruins more, I don’t know why, It just seemed more original and the views surrounding the castle were amazing, Our tour guide mentioned that this was situated in a valley, back in the day it helped the soldiers also to be able to see from every direction when an enemy approached, but yeah Boldogko had more to offer, its museum, plays, a restaurant, better souvenirs. Entry ticket for Regec was 700ft and that for Boldogko was 800ft. I think its great that both attractions had toilets, yeah just had to write this here.

From here we drove another 8 minutes to the Palinka haz. Watch out for the next blog post.

I’ve only been on two trips with Interhelp desk but I appreciate the fact that in visiting any region, they try to help you maximise your visit, in that, you get to see every attraction that the region has to offer. Also the tour group is always a fun bunch.

You can read about my hiking trip in Lillafured also with Interhelp desk here, don’t forget to check out their website if you’re in Hungary for upcoming trips, tours and packages.

And stay tuned for the next post with regards to our excursion to the Palinka haz, crazy Hungarian stuff I tell you!

If you’d like to read more articles about Hungary on the blog; take a look at these below:

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