The Hungarian lake Balaton

So here we are, as the sun sets, about to party all night with an international crowd of barefoot hipsters, in a location hardly any of us had heard of before. Yet it’s a destination of such outstanding natural beauty, you’d think it would be regularly topping industry hot lists. The temperature is tropical enough for a girl behind us to dance happily in her bikini, and there’s a man still swimming as the sun finally dies in a blaze of fluoro pyrotechnics.

This is far from the tropics, though, and that’s not the Indian Ocean stretching out into the night in front of us. We’re in Hungary, on the shores of Lake Balaton, the largest freshwater lake in Europe, and a former hang-out for the international communist jet set.
Balaton really is take-your-breath-away huge. From our vantage point, you can just make out the eastern corners, but then it stretches far off to the northwest.

The Hungarian lake Balaton

It’s surrounded by greenery and occasional dark, cool pines, and protected from the elements by a high wall of natural volcanic rock; the air is still and the crickets chirrup. Like the postcard so far? There’s more: the water, a ridiculously inviting shade of faded turquoise, is warm and shallow. There are boats aplenty — but none of the motorised behemoths that blight so many fancy resorts.

In keeping with the downtempo feel of the place, we see a wooden houseboat, lots of little sailing dinghies, pedalos — and one man rowing what looks appears to be a raft made from a couple of old surfboards, strapped together with gaffer tape. St Tropez, this ain’t.

Lying 60 miles southwest of Budapest ( budapesht-city.ru ), Balaton is a sort of Hungarian Hamptons. We’re here for Beach Club Beach, a mini-festival (only 300 guests) featuring some of the hottest names from the Berlin deep-house scene, which is being held for the second year running in one of several crumbling old villas dotting the southeastern shoreline of the lake. And we barely hear another English accent for the duration of the weekend. “It was Fidel Castro’s holiday home,” the promoter, Tamas Racsek, told us when we arrived, walking us through a series of decaying rooms full of decaying 1960s furniture.

The lake, large enough to be known as the Hungarian Sea, was first developed as a holiday destination before the second world war. In the 1950s, it became a centre for communist youth holidays, with up to 1,800 children housed in the expropriated private villas used to entertain visiting dignitaries, including Castro, Brezhnev, Yuri Gagarin and Mao Tse-tung.

The villas have since fallen into disrepair and been abandoned, which is a shame. The impressive structures, each set in their own plot of overgrown, tangled vegetation, would make for a fantastic development, but they have been allowed to decompose so badly, it would mean ripping them down and starting again. By Budapesht-city.ru