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.
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Bergkirche Rodaun is a functioning church in Vienna’s Rodaun district. Its name refers to its elevated setting, giving the building a distinctive position within the neighbourhood.
Erlöserkirche Endresstraße
Erlöserkirche is a church on Endresstraße in Vienna. Its role is best understood through its place in the city’s neighbourhood religious landscape: it is a church building serving worship and community life, rather than a large museum complex.
Evang. Johanneskirche
The Evangelische Johanneskirche, known in English as the Church of St. John, is a Protestant church in Vienna. It serves the Evangelical Lutheran tradition and belongs to the city’s diverse religious and architectural landscape.
Johanneskirche is a church in Vienna, Austria, serving as a place of Christian worship within the capital’s broad religious and architectural landscape.
Hofmannsthal-Schlössl is a historic building in Vienna associated with the von Hofmannsthal family, notable for their cultural significance in Austrian history. The structure represents aristocratic Viennese architecture and serves as a tangible connection to the city's literary and social heritage.
Ehem. Etablissement Gschwandner
Etablissement Gschwandner, also known locally as Ehem. Etablissement Gschwandner, is a former entertainment establishment in Vienna.
Aquädukt Liesing
The Liesing Aqueduct, known locally as Aquädukt Liesing, is a historic water-bridge structure in Vienna’s twenty-third district, Liesing. It belongs to the city’s wider history of water-management and public engineering, showing how infrastructure can become part of an urban landscape.
Aquädukt Speising
Aquädukt Speising is a historic aqueduct in southern Vienna and a tangible example of municipal water engineering.
Heldendenkmal der Roten Armee
The Soviet War Memorial on Schwarzenbergplatz commemorates the Red Army soldiers killed during the Vienna Offensive of April 1945, and was built and unveiled by Soviet authorities the same year, within months of the city's capture.
The Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, the Museum of Military History, is Austria's oldest purpose-built museum structure, opened in 1891 inside the Arsenal complex as the k.k. Hofwaffenmuseum and renamed to its current form in 1955.
Wiener Gasometer
The Gasometers are four Victorian gas holders with flats inside them.
Karl-Marx-Hof
Karl-Marx-Hof is a block of council flats 1,100 m long, and it is one of the longest single residential buildings in the world.
The Pestsäule is a promise made by an emperor who had left town.
Donauinsel, the Danube Island, is a 21.1-kilometre artificial island built between the 1970s and early 1980s as a flood-relief channel, running as a narrow strip between the Danube itself and a new parallel channel, the Neue Donau, dug specifically to…
Stephansplatz is the square at the geographic and historic centre of Vienna, formed around St. Stephen's Cathedral and taking its name directly from it.
Kahlenberg is a 484 m hill on the northern rim of the Vienna Woods and the city's most visited viewpoint, looking south over the whole basin the Innere Stadt sits in and east across the Danube towards the Marchfeld plain.
The Theater an der Wien is where Fidelio, the Fifth Symphony and The Merry Widow were first heard, and it is still working.
Nationalpark Donau-Auen
Danube-Auen National Park protects the last long stretch of undammed floodplain forest on the Danube in Austria, running roughly 36 km from the eastern edge of Vienna to the Slovak border at Bratislava.
Technisches Museum
The Technisches Museum Wien is Austria's largest museum of technology and industry, on Mariahilfer Straße in the 14th district, Penzing.
Volksoper
The Volksoper is Vienna's second opera house, in the 9th district, Alsergrund, built for a public that the court-affiliated Hofoper across town did not serve.
The Stadttempel is Vienna's main synagogue, and it survived 1938 because it is hidden.
The Architekturzentrum Wien, usually shortened to Az W, is Austria's centre for the exhibition and documentation of architecture, inside the MuseumsQuartier in the 7th district.
Schloss Wilhelminenberg sits on a wooded hill above Ottakring, Vienna's 16th district, built in the 1730s for Field Marshal Guido Starhemberg and later named for Archduchess Wilhelmine, who owned it in the nineteenth century.
Palais Schwarzenberg is a Baroque garden palace at the edge of the Belvedere district, begun for Count Heinrich Franz von Mansfeld-Fondi and continued after his death by the Schwarzenberg family, who gave it its present name.
Künstlerhaus Wien
The Kunstlerhaus is Vienna's oldest surviving purpose-built exhibition hall for the fine arts, standing on Karlsplatz next to the Musikverein.
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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