Trail running
in the Pilis hills

The Pilis hills are the best trail running near Budapest — and it's not close. Half an hour to an hour from the city you hit limestone ridges, beech forest, and a century-old web of marked paths that climb, twist and descend far more than anything inside the city limits. The terrain is runnable but honest: enough relief to train on real hills, enough singletrack to keep a race interesting, and enough shade under the beech canopy to run through a Hungarian summer.

That terrain has built a genuine race ecosystem. The spring season opens around mid-April with Pilis Trail, run from Piliscsaba over distances from a sharp short race up to a long mountain race. Early June brings Crosskovácsi at Nagykovácsi, starting in the Teleki-Tisza castle park with everything from a family dash to a half-marathon distance. The headline event is the Salomon Ultra-Trail Hungary out of Szentendre — a UTMB-Index weekend whose races stretch from a short taster up to a 100-kilometre-plus ultra across the Pilis and Visegrádi hills. Smaller rounds from series like the terepfutas.hu TRAILS calendar fill in the gaps. Each race's own page carries the current distances and date.

Most races run spring and autumn, when the footing is firm and the heat is gone, and a few are night runs decided by headtorch. You can reach almost every start town without a car: the HÉV suburban line (H5 from Batthyány tér) serves Szentendre, and Volánbusz coaches from Budapest's northern hubs reach Piliscsaba, Pilisvörösvár and Nagykovácsi directly — most start towns are a 45–75 minute trip. The category is broad, so the odd road race lands here too — a half marathon along the Danube Bend, say — but the Pilis is, first and last, trail country.

New to the trails, or want to recce a course before race day? The same paths these races use are mapped in our hiking and trails system — start there to plan a training route, then come back here for the calendar.