Gellért Hill is the highest point of Budapest. The legend has it that it is a place where all the Hungarian witches convene. Well this might have been true in the past but now Gellért Hill seems more like a convention point of hordes of tourists. The view over Budapest from the citadel is spectacular. The citadel was build by the Habsburgs after suppressing Hungarian revolution in 1848.
The large statue of a female in front of the citadel should have had an airplane's propeller in her hands, as it was designed as a monument for the son of Admiral Horthy who died in an air crash. The monument however didn't go up until 1947 and since the Admiral's historical importance diminished in the meanwhile, the propeller has been replaced by a palm leaf and Russian soldiers have been added to the base of the monument which has been named the Liberation Monument – the liberation meaning the liberation of Budapest by the Red Army. The Liberation Monument is one of the few monuments of previous regime which have not been moved to Statue Park. It has been slightly adapted though: the names of Russian soldiers that used to be inscribed on the monument can't be seen anymore.
Gellért Hill is also famous because of the murder of Bishop Gellért, who has helped king Stephen to convert his people to Christianity. This made the Pagan chieftains so angry that they beat up the Bishop to death and pushed him down the hill into the Danube. The legend has it that it took seven years for the rain to wash Gellért's blood off the stones. The statue of Gellért now stands at the base of the hill. He is looking across Elisabeth's Bridge to Pest, holding a cross in his hand. The stones under the statue are being symbolically washed by an artificial waterfall.
The third attraction of Gellért Hill is a cave transformed into a church near Gellért Hotel. In early Middle Ages the cave has been allegedly inhabited by hermit Iván who had been using water from a nearby thermal spring to heal patients suffering from various diseases. In the mid-1920s the Paulines (the only monastic order of Hungarian origin) transformed the cave into a chapel modelled on the one in Lourdes. In the 1950s the Communists seized and sealed the chapel and dissolved the Paulines. In 1989 the chapel was returned to the Church and can be visited today. A part of the wall that Communists built to seal the chapel can still be seen.