As the city’s biggest annual celebration of street art, Budapest’s Színes Város Festival provides diverse artists from around the world with the opportunity to enhance varied urban walls with amazing murals. This year, most of these oversized paintings are centered around the theme of classic Hungarian icons, while the rest present more fanciful visions by British, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Argentinian artists. We present an overview of 2015’s larger-than-life public artworks that are freshly making Budapest a more visually intriguing place.

Since 2009, the Színes Város project uses old, crumbling building walls around Budapest as gigantic canvases with the help of Hungarian and international artists. As a result, you can bump into creative murals on almost every corner, like Swallows or City People. The first painting of this year’s Színes Város Festival was created in June, and it was followed by 12 others. The artists were chosen after an exclusive, invitation-only competition by the following judges: János Sugár (MKE university teacher), György László Pálfi (MOME honorary associate professor), Szabolcs Sidó (Budapest Vezérigazgatóság Zrt. managing director), and Tamás Dévényi (Chamber of Hungarian Architects president).

Thanks to the Ministry Of Agriculture, eight of the pictures were centered around the topic of hungaricums, in order to bring traditional Hungarian values closer to younger generations. So, from now on, don’t be surprised if you bump into pictures of red onion from Makó or spice pepper from Szeged at different points of the city, including unexpected sites – for example, on the pillars beneath the Buda off-ramp of Elizabeth Bridge, some of the most alluring things about Budapest were painted: the world-famous medicinal waters, promoting the thermal baths around the city.

Three of the paintings were commissioned by the Hungarian Tourism board, and were inspired by what foreigners think about Hungary. According to them, Budapest exceeds visitor expectations, and ranks high on world travelers’ “must-see” lists.

The creator of the festival’s closing project, Károly Mesterházy (aka BreakOne), graduated from Budapest’s Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design with a graphic-design BA. His name may be familiar from the swallow-themed mural on Akácfa Street last year, and from now on, you can link another animal-themed painting to him too. This time, he painted a white stag on one of the walls of Régiposta Street, summoning a powerful figure of Hungarian mythology.

With the arrival of autumn, the painting of new outdoor murals was no longer feasible, so we will have to wait until next summer to see what new murals will decorate the city after the 2016 Színes Város Festival – but for now we are happy to see so much fresh local color citywide.