Bratislava Audio Tours

Bratislava holds a record that took some peculiar geographic luck to achieve: it is the only national capital in the world with land borders touching two other sovereign states, Austria and Hungary. Vienna is fifty kilometres to the west, and on clear days you can see the Austrian hills from the castle hill. For two and a half centuries, from 1536 to 1783, the city served as the capital and coronation site of the Kingdom of Hungary, and eleven Hungarian kings and eight queens were crowned at St Martin's Cathedral during that period. The cathedral still stands in the old town, directly under the bridge approach where the communist-era SNP Bridge now cuts.

That bridge, with its flying saucer restaurant balanced on a single pylon above the Danube, was built in the 1970s at the cost of demolishing the historic Jewish quarter that had stood beside the old town.

The loss and the replacement sit next to each other with uncomfortable proximity: the medieval fabric on one side of the road, the brutalist ambition on the other. The communist period also built Petrzalka, a housing estate on the south bank of the Danube that was the largest panel-block development in Central Europe, home to a hundred thousand people in grey concrete towers with extraordinary views of the castle across the river.