City guide · Austria
Vienna is 414.78 km² holding 2,028,499 people, and almost everything a visitor comes for sits inside a single ring road less than a kilometre across. The Inner...
Photograph · Andrzej Otrębski · CC BY-SA 4.0
Set your days, your pace and the hours you actually want to be out. The planner works around closing days and travel time, and leaves room to eat.
Editorial responsibility: Elena Voss · Roavina Travel Editor
Vienna is 414.78 km² holding 2,028,499 people, and almost everything a visitor comes for sits inside a single ring road less than a kilometre across.
The Innere Stadt — the 1st district — is the medieval core, and the Ringstrasse that surrounds it was built in the second half of the nineteenth century on the line of the demolished bastions. The 371-hectare historic centre has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001; it was on the endangered list from 2017 to 2026.
The wider urban area holds 2,223,236 people and the metropolitan area 2,890,577, which makes Vienna the tenth largest city in Europe and by a long way the largest in Austria.
Checked 2026-08-23
November · November in Vienna has mean high 7.5°C, mean low 2.4°C, rainfall 50.0 mm, 8.3 rain days. Cold temperatures make a full outdoor itinerary less comfortable. A flexible November itinerary in Vienna is more realistic than a long exposed walking day.
Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.
145 places match
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Parlament
The Austrian Parliament Building is Vienna’s working national legislature, designed by Theophil Hansen in a deliberately Greek-inspired style. Construction ran from 1874 to 1883, when classical forms were used to express the building’s association with democratic government.
The Burgtheater is Austria's national theatre and one of the most important German-language stages in the world.
Heldenplatz is an unfinished square in front of the Hofburg, and it is the most politically loaded piece of ground in Austria.
Mozarthaus Vienna, at Domgasse 5 in the Innere Stadt, is the only one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Viennese residences still standing.
The Haus der Musik is a ticketed, interactive sound museum in the Palais Erzherzog Karl on Seilerstatte, a five-minute walk from the Vienna State Opera.
The Naschmarkt is Vienna's largest and oldest continuously running market, a roughly 1.5-kilometre strip of stalls running along the covered-over bed of the Wien River between Karlsplatz and Kettenbrückengasse.
Wagenburg
The Sigmund Freud Museum occupies the apartment and consulting rooms at Berggasse 19 in Alsergrund where Sigmund Freud lived and practised from 1891 until June 1938, when he fled Vienna for London after the Nazi annexation of Austria.
The Vienna Central Cemetery (Wiener Zentralfriedhof) is one of the largest cemeteries in the world by number of interred and the best known of Vienna's nearly 50 cemeteries.
Museum für Angewandte Kunst
The MAK was the first museum of its kind on the continent, and it was founded to improve manufacturing.
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
mumok — the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig — is Austria's largest museum of modern and contemporary art, and the darkest building on the MuseumsQuartier plaza by design.
Wien Museum Karlsplatz
Wien Museum, on Karlsplatz, is Vienna's museum of its own history, tracing the city from the Roman camp of Vindobona through the medieval, Baroque and Ringstrasse periods to the twentieth century.
Weltmuseum
Weltmuseum Wien occupies the Neue Burg wing of the Hofburg on Heldenplatz and holds Vienna's global ethnographic collections, assembled from Habsburg holdings and expedition material going back to the museum's founding as the Museum für Völkerkunde in 1876.
Belvedere 21 is Vienna's museum for contemporary art, housed in a steel-and-glass pavilion in the Schweizergarten, a few hundred metres south of the Baroque Belvedere palace complex it is administratively part of.
Rathauspark is a public park in Vienna, situated adjacent to the Vienna City Hall (Rathaus). The park is divided into two sections by the Rathaus building's approach.
Holocaust-Mahnmal
The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial is a sealed concrete sculpture by the British artist Rachel Whiteread, unveiled on 25 October 2000 on Judenplatz in the Innere Stadt.
The Ankeruhr is Vienna’s Art Nouveau clock on Hoher Markt, built across the gap between two buildings associated with the Anker Insurance company.
Bermudadreieck is a nightlife district in Vienna's Innere Stadt, centered on the area around Rabensteig, Seitenstettengasse, and Judengasse. The name translates to Bermuda Triangle, referencing how visitors may lose track of time amid its dense concentration of bars and venues.
Wiener Konzerthaus
The Wiener Konzerthaus is a concert hall on Lothringerstraße in the third district, opened in 1913 and built to designs by Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer, the same firm behind several of the city's historic theatres.
Johann Strauß
The Monument to Johann Strauss II is a gilded bronze memorial honoring the celebrated Austrian composer known as the Waltz King. Erected in Vienna's Stadtpark, it depicts Strauss playing violin.
The Graben is a broad, elongated square in the Innere Stadt, and its name — 'ditch' — records what it once was: the moat of the Roman legionary camp of Vindobona, filled in during the Middle Ages and built over.
Votivkirche
The Votivkirche exists because somebody tried to kill the emperor and failed.
The Donauturm is the tallest structure in Austria, at 252 m, and it was built as a garden show attraction.
District boundaries come from OSM administrative relations, so a district page holds exactly the places inside it — plus, for the islands and the coast, the nearest district by proximity.
Twenty-three districts, numbered roughly in the order they were absorbed, arranged around the 1st.
The Innere Stadt is the 1st and holds the cathedral, the Hofburg, the opera and most of what a short visit will see. Districts 2 to 9 and 20 were incorporated in 1850 and lie inside the Gürtel, the outer ring road; they are the inner districts and are where most visitors sleep and eat. Districts 10 to 19 and 21 to 23 came in between 1874 and 1938, mostly in 1892.
Districts 21 and 22 are across the Danube on the left bank — Floridsdorf is the northernmost part of the city and Donaustadt the largest by area. Districts 2 and 20 sit on the island between the Danube and the Donaukanal.
The postal code gives the district: 1XXA, where the middle two digits are the district number. An address at 1070 is in the 7th.
Checked 2026-08-23
The U-Bahn, the trams, and a ticket that covers both.
The U-Bahn has five lines, 109 stations and 83.9 km of track, and it opened on 25 February 1978. It carried 404.8 million passengers in 2023. Trains run from about 05:00 to 01:00 at intervals of two to fifteen minutes, and run all night at fifteen-minute intervals on Friday and Saturday nights and before public holidays.
A sixth line, the U5, is under construction for completion between 2026 and 2032; the network will then be 90 km with 116 stations.
Tickets are integrated with the trams, the buses and the S-Bahn through the VOR system, so one ticket covers the whole journey. Some airport services are outside it.
Inside the Ring, walking beats all of it.
Checked 2026-08-23
Suggested stay for a first visit: 3–4 days. Two days cover the Innere Stadt and the Ring — the cathedral, the Hofburg, the opera, the museums on the Maria-Theresien-Platz. A third takes Schönbrunn and the Belvedere, and a fourth allows a proper concert or an afternoon in the wine villages.
Twenty-three of them, numbered roughly in the order they joined the city. The 1st is the medieval centre, districts 2–9 and 20 came in 1850 and lie inside the Gürtel, and the rest arrived between 1874 and 1938. The postal code carries the number: 1070 is the 7th district.
The boulevard built in the second half of the nineteenth century on the line of the demolished city bastions, encircling the Innere Stadt. Most of Vienna's great public buildings face onto it.
For anything beyond the Ring, yes. Five lines, 109 stations, 83.9 km, running from about 05:00 to 01:00 and all night at weekends. Inside the Ring, walking is faster.
April to June and September to October. Summer afternoons reach 27–32°C and the palace gardens have little shade; winter hovers around freezing but brings the concert season and the Christmas markets.
414.78 km² with 2,028,499 people in the city proper, 2,223,236 in the urban area and 2,890,577 in the metropolitan area — the tenth largest city in Europe.
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