Wonderful hotel. Highly recommended. This is the offshoot of a restaurant, which is also highly recommended, both of which are perfectly located, just off the bottom end of the historical castle centre. The restaurant has been running for 14 years or so, the hotel for only a few. The publicity that comes up on the hotel sites doesn’t do the hotel justice. It represents the new Hungary, with young staff, many speaking excellent English, and spacious accommodation. The hotel is quite small, the result of the adaptation of a couple of buildings on a narrow street next to the restaurant. Our room was a suite, with a roomy bathroom, sitting room, and a good sized bedroom. The bed was a proper one, unlike so many is this part of the world, which usually have two separate mattress in boxes. We just slipped into a normal lifestyle here, and it would be perfect for a longer stay. Free wifi with no password nonsense. Dinner at the restaurant was very good, and much cheaper than a meal of equivalent quality in Vienna or Ljubjlana.
The old castle centre of Veszprem is very beautiful and amazingly quiet. It is all prepared for tourism but seems not to have been discovered yet, so you have the town pretty much to yourself. In Hungary it is hard to work out from guidebooks what the towns are really like. The tourist heart of Vezprem is nothing like such relentlessly downmarket towns as Keszthely, which can be depressing; it is more like a quiet provincial mini-Ljubljana: perfect for the discerning tourist wanting a getaway. Much EU money has been spend on restorations and museums (the Oliva hotel has also benefited from this source). Particularly interesting is the László Károly Collection in the Dubniczay Palace, which is a collection of modernist Hungarian art collected by the Basel-based art collector Károly László. This is almost a parody of what was once the popular conception of a modern art collection, filled with works that were once considered difficult but which today have a delightful period charm. There is some interesting sculpture and constructivist-type two dimensional art by artists who are not well-known outside Hungary (although Moholy-Nagy is there) but who are well worth looking at. The townscape of the castle area is exceptionally beautiful, with some unexpected touches. There is a magnificent baroque bishop’s palace, but the two churches nearby, one of which is the cathedral, are in fact early twentieth century. The entrance to the castle is a 1930s mock bastion with reliefs of angels, the kind of intervention impossible today but fitting the early modernist tenor of the László museum. There is a fair number of Sezession facades amongst those in baroque and neo-renaissance styles. At the end of the castle precinct is a parapet with an extraordinary view over the rocky end of the castle peak, with a baroque church into the distance at the left, the town beneath, and communist era high rises to the right.
