Budapest (Hungarian pronunciation (IPA): [budɒpɛʃt]) is the capital of Hungary and its main industrial, commercial and transport. The city has 1,712,210 inhabitants (2009), a significant decrease from just under 2.1 million counted in the mid-1980s, representing one fifth of the total population of Hungary. It is the ninth largest city in the European Union. The metropolitan area of Budapest has a population of 2.38 million.

Budapest is the result of unification in 1873, occupying both sides of the Danube River, the cities of Buda and Obuda, on the right bank with Pest on the left bank.

Buda and Budapest itself were real Hungarian headquarters in various occupations during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, modern and contemporary times until 1944 when the monarchy disappeared in Hungary.

It is subdivided into twenty-three districts (kerület) of which six are located in Buda, Pest and one sixteenth between them in the Csepel Island.

Budapest's climate is temperate, with hot summers and cold winters and short.

Budapest's recorded history dates back to the ancient Roman city of Aquincum, founded in the year 89 on the site of an ancient Celtic camp, near what is now Óbuda. From 106 until the end of the fourth century, was the capital of the province of Pannonia.

By the year 896 the Magyars, the ancestors of the Hungarian people present, colonize the region under the leadership of Árpád, and come to inhabit the valley pannoniano and Óbuda sector. Hungary was founded a year later in the year 1000 with the crowning of its first King Stephen I. The city was almost destroyed by the Mongols in 1241 and the royal residence was moved to Visegrád in 1308. Buda (pest) became the Hungarian real headquarters of the country in 1408.

The conquest of most of the country by the Ottoman Empire disrupted the growth of the city. Pest fell to the invaders in 1526. Buddha, who was defended by its castle, he met the same fate fifteen years later. While Buddha is a support for the Turkish government in the region, Pest is abandoned by its inhabitants. After the reconquest in 1686 by the Habsburgs, who had been Kings of Hungary since 1526, much of the territory had been lost.

During the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and despite a great flood that left some 70,000 dead, Pest experienced tremendous growth, through trade and growth of the three cities combined. In 1780, the German is introduced as an official language by the Habsburgs.

The merger of the three cities PTO first impulse in 1849 by a revolutionary government, before being withdrawn after the restoration of Habsburg authority. The union of the three cities is constituted by the autonomous Hungarian royal government in 1873 after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.

In 1900 the population of Pest was more important than the Buddha and Óbuda together, and the city was the second of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after Vienna, reaching one million people to the suburbs in 1914. Over the next century, the population multiplied by twenty, while that of Buda and Óbuda is multiplied by five. During the twentieth century, most of Hungarian industry focused on Budapest, the population growth was so important.

After the First World War and following the defeat of the Central Powers establishing an independent Hungarian state of the former imperial power with its capital in Budapest. The human casualties of the First World War and the loss of more than two thirds of the territory of the former Hungary constituted a temporary trauma: Budapest was now the capital of a country much smaller, but fully independent and sovereign.

In the period between the wars, the city grew dramatically, reaching one million inhabitants in 1930. This situation is truncated to the Second World War, during which suffer aerial bombardment by the Allies to destroy part of the city. The fence which was applied to the city by the Red Army also ravaged the population.

After the war, the city falls into the Soviet orbit and its population reaches two million in 1990. Since then, the population has been declining as a result of the low birth rate and emigration.