Lake Balaton tourism

In the exhibition you will experience the real retro atmosphere of Lake Balaton, and among other things you will get acquainted with the “socialist riviera” and “Zimmer Feri” feelings of life (from ‘Zimmer Frei’ – German ‘Free room’).

Entering the exhibition hall, you will find yourself in the world of the vineyard hills of the north coast, and you can become part of a harvest parade. A short walk takes you to the terrace of a bathhouse.

You can enter the dimensional reconstruction of the former Bathing Island in Keszthely, and you can even peek into a changing room.

Photos and advertisements of restaurants, hotels and guesthouses provide an insight into the hospitality of Lake Balaton at the beginning of the 20th century. Listening to contemporary hits, you can find out which coastal promenades and clubs were the venues for the meetings and social life of the bathing guests.

In our exhibition we also present the reconstruction of an old touring canoe. Surprisingly, many of today’s popular beaches once served as cattle watering places. Gradually, however, the coastal bathing buildings and cabin rows were built up.

From the 1960s, tourism at Lake Balaton revived: Hungarian-style inns and wine bars were popular with foreign guests, but modern restaurants and beach snack stalls were also popular with holidaymakers. Our visitors can even relax at the exhibition at counter of a typical Balaton snack bar.

Food menus, drink menus, posters of traditional programs, and furnished souvenir shop windows evoke the era. Would you have taken a folk ornament, or rather a goat’s claw (shell) from Tihany, as a souvenir from your holiday at Lake Balaton?

Socialism from the 1960s and 1980s was a period of mass tourism at Lake Balaton.

At this stage of our exhibition you can experience the real “Balaton retro” atmosphere.

In photos you can see the hotels, motels and crowded campsites of the “Socialist Riviera”.

Towards the end of your walk, you will arrive at the sandy beach on the south shore, where a bathing lady and her sunbathing objects evoke the 1970s. The heyday of letting out private houses and rooms fell in the 1970s and 1980s, and the furnished terrace of a holiday home relates to this, where you can easily imagine the well-paying foreign guests or the Hungarian hosts giving up their own comfort – the “Zimmer Feri”s.