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Austria

5 city guides · Europe

Cities in Austria (5)

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🇦🇹 Austria

Graz

Graz is Austria's second city and its most underrated — a compact, walkable UNESCO World Heritage old town of 300,000 people where the Habsburg Schlossberg dominates the skyline, the Kunsthaus Graz (Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, 2003) looks like a blue alien has landed between the baroque townhouses, and the Styrian culinary tradition (kürbiskernöl pumpkin-seed oil, Styrian wine, Steirisches Kürbis) makes Graz one of the best food cities in the Alps. The Mur River bisects the city; Murinsel, a floating steel island-café designed by Vito Acconci, connects the two banks. Graz takes a full day just to understand what makes it special: the layered architecture (Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, Biedermeier, and now contemporary all within 500 metres), the Hauptplatz daily market, and the absence of crowds that Vienna suffers. Population: 300,000 city. Best months: April–June, September–October.

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Innsbruck

Innsbruck is the capital of the Austrian state of Tyrol — a city of 140,000 people in the Inn River valley, surrounded on all sides by the Northern Limestone Alps (the Nordkette range rises directly above the city to 2,334m, with a cable car from the old town to the summit in 20 minutes). The name means 'Bridge over the Inn' (Inn + Brücke — the Inn being a major Alpine river rising in the Swiss Engadin). Innsbruck was the favourite city of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519), who spent much of his reign here, commissioned the Goldenes Dachl (Golden Roof — a 1500 oriel window on his court residence covered in 2,657 fire-gilded copper tiles, the most photographed building in Innsbruck), and is buried — though he died in Wels — in a memorial in the Hofkirche (the Court Church). The city hosted the Winter Olympics twice (1964 and 1976), and the Bergisel Ski Jump (a Zaha Hadid–designed tower above the Bergisel hill, 2002) is one of the finest works of architecture in Austria. The combination of an intact medieval and Baroque old town, a functioning ski resort accessible from the city centre, and Habsburg imperial legacy in one compact valley city makes Innsbruck one of the most rewarding compact city breaks in the Alps. Best months: December–March (winter sports) or June–September (hiking, warm weather, the Nordkette trail network).

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Linz

Linz (population 210,000) is the capital of Upper Austria and Austria's third-largest city — an industrial city on the Danube River, 190km west of Vienna and 30km south of the Czech border, that has undergone one of the most successful cultural transformations of any European city in the 21st century. Linz was Adolf Hitler's hometown (Hitler spent his childhood and adolescence in Linz from 1895 to 1908; the city was the site of one of the largest Nazi armaments complexes in Europe (the Reichswerke Hermann Göring (later VOEST-Alpine (now voestalpine)) steelworks, built with forced labour including concentration camp prisoners); Hitler planned to make Linz the cultural capital of the Third Reich, with a projected 'Führermuseum' of looted European art). After WWII, Linz processed this history through cultural regeneration: the Ars Electronica Center (the world's leading museum of digital art and technology, founded 1979; the home of the Ars Electronica Festival (the world's most important festival of art, technology, and society)); the Lentos Museum of Modern Art (the striking glass-and-steel museum on the Danube by the architects Weber + Hofer); and the Tabakfabrik (the 1935 modernist former tobacco factory converted to one of the finest creative industry campuses in Austria). The Stift St. Florian (the Augustinian monastery 18km south of Linz — Austria's finest Baroque monastery, where Anton Bruckner was born, trained, and is buried in the crypt) is the essential day trip. Best months: April–October.

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Salzburg

Salzburg is the capital of the Austrian federal state of Salzburg and the fourth-largest city in Austria — a city of 155,000 on the Salzach River at the foot of the Berchtesgaden Alps, 140 km east of Munich, 300 km west of Vienna. Salzburg is synonymous with two things: Mozart and The Sound of Music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born here on January 27, 1756 at Getreidegasse 9 — the most visited birth house in the world of a classical composer — and Salzburg is the home of the Salzburg Festival (founded 1920, the world's most prestigious classical music festival: 5 weeks in July-August, 200+ performances of opera, drama and concerts, 250,000 visitors; tickets sell out within hours of release, often the same day; the Felsenreitschule — the open-air stage carved into the rock face of the Mönchsberg cliff — is the most dramatic outdoor opera venue in the world). The Sound of Music (the 1965 Robert Wise film with Julie Andrews, filmed almost entirely in and around Salzburg, the third highest-grossing film of all time when released, still generating 300,000 Sound of Music tourists per year in Salzburg) uses the Mirabell Gardens, the Nonnberg Abbey, the Mondsee Cathedral, and the Leopoldskron Palace as its key filming locations. The historic centre of Salzburg (UNESCO World Heritage since 1996 — awarded for the finest surviving Baroque urban ensemble north of the Alps) has the Cathedral (Dom, 1628, the first example of Baroque architecture north of the Alps), the Residenz (the archbishop's palace), the Stift Nonnberg (the oldest working Benedictine convent in the German-speaking world, founded 714 AD — the real convent where Maria von Trapp was a novice), the Hohensalzburg Fortress (1077, the largest fully preserved medieval castle in Central Europe), and the Getreidegasse — one of the most photographed streets in Austria, with its Gothic merchant townhouses and guild iron signs.

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Vienna

Vienna (Wien) is the great imperial city of central Europe — the capital of the Habsburg Empire for 640 years, a metropolis of 1.9 million that reached its cultural peak around 1900 when Freud was inventing psychoanalysis, Klimt was painting The Kiss, Mahler was conducting at the Opera, Schönberg was inventing modern music, and Otto Wagner was redesigning the city with his Secessionist architecture. That convergence of art, music, psychology and architecture in one city at one moment (the Fin de Siècle) is still the most important single cultural explosion of the 20th century — and every room of the Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Secession building contains evidence of it. Vienna is also the coffee house capital of the world (the Viennese Kaffeehaus is UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage), the waltz and the concert hall capital of the world (the Vienna Philharmonic, the Musikverein, the State Opera), and the city that produces the finest Wiener Schnitzel and Sachertorte. No city in Europe offers more culture per square kilometre.

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