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Country guide

Theme: History in Austria

Austria is 83,879 km², and its nine states fall into two kinds of trip. Vienna, Lower Austria and Upper Austria lie along the Danube on level, easily crossed gr...

Photograph · C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

7,381 Places
2Cities

Reviewed by Elena Voss · Roavina Travel Editor

Austria is 83,879 km², and its nine states fall into two kinds of trip. Vienna, Lower Austria and Upper Austria lie along the Danube on level, easily crossed ground, with Vienna alone holding 1,931,593 of the country's roughly nine million people. Tyrol, Salzburg, Vorarlberg and Styria are the Alpine states, entered by valley rather than by plain, and their capitals — Innsbruck, Salzburg, Bregenz, Graz — are each small enough to cross on foot in an afternoon. The distinction decides an itinerary: the Danube cities sit an hour apart by train and the mountain ones do not.

Checked 2026-08-25

Cities

Every city catalogued in this country so far, ranked by how much there is to see.

Practical information

Language spoken
German
German is Austria's official language; Croatian, Slovenian and Hungarian also have official status in some regions
Dialling code
+43
Austria's international country code
Currency
Euro (€, EUR)
Austria introduced euro banknotes and coins in 2002
Emergency number
112
One number across the country; 144 reaches an ambulance directly
Plug type
Not recorded
No verified national official source was found
Tap water
Safe to drink
Austria's national tourism authority states that tap water is drinkable in every region

Top things to see

Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.

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111 places match

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Category

Historic monuments 78 Museums 30 Places of worship 3 Nature sites 0 Viewpoints 0 Food and drink 0 Markets and shopping 0 Entertainment 0 Nightlife 0 Family attractions 0 Art and culture 0 Activities 0

Typical visit duration

Up to 1 hour 80 1 to 2 hours 25 Half a day or more 6

Interests

History 111 Art 5 Museums 32 Nature 11 Sea and beach 4 Viewpoints 7
  1. Schönbrunn Palace Schönbrunn Palace
    01 4 hours

    Schönbrunn Palace

    Schloss Schönbrunn

    Schönbrunn Palace is Vienna’s former Habsburg summer residence and one of Europe’s great imperial complexes.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  2. St. Stephen's Cathedral St. Stephen's Cathedral
    02 1 hour

    St. Stephen's Cathedral

    Stephansdom

    St. Stephen’s Cathedral is Vienna’s working metropolitan church and the defining landmark of Stephansplatz. Its story reaches back to a foundation in 1137, while Gothic rebuilding began in 1359 under Duke Rudolf IV.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  3. Belvedere Belvedere
    03 2 hours

    Belvedere

    Belvedere is Prince Eugene of Savoy’s former summer residence, not one palace but a carefully staged Baroque ensemble in Vienna’s Landstraße district.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  4. Vienna State Opera house Vienna State Opera house
    04 45 min

    Vienna State Opera house

    Wiener Staatsoper

    The Vienna State Opera was hated when it opened and it killed both its architects.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  5. Kunsthistorisches Museum Kunsthistorisches Museum
    05 3 hours

    Kunsthistorisches Museum

    Kunsthistorisches Museum is Vienna’s imperial art museum, built as a purpose-made home for the Habsburg collections on Maria-Theresien-Platz. Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer designed it between 1871 and 1891, and it opened in 1891.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  6. Albertina Albertina
    06 2 hours

    Albertina

    Albertina is a museum in a former Habsburg palace above Albertinaplatz, immediately behind Vienna’s State Opera.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  7. Wiener Riesenrad Wiener Riesenrad
    07 30 min

    Wiener Riesenrad

    Riesenrad

    Wiener Riesenrad is Vienna’s historic giant wheel at the entrance to the Prater, built in 1897 for Emperor Franz Joseph’s Golden Jubilee. Harry Hitchins and Hubert Cecil Booth designed it, and Walter Basset Bassett built it.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  8. MuseumsQuartier MuseumsQuartier
    08 30 min

    MuseumsQuartier

    The MuseumsQuartier is one of the largest cultural districts in the world by area, roughly 90,000 square metres, built inside the former imperial court stables, the Hofstallungen, originally constructed in the early eighteenth century under plans associated with Johann Bernhard…

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  9. Vienna City Hall Vienna City Hall
    09 20 min

    Vienna City Hall

    Rathaus

    The Rathaus is a Gothic cathedral that turned out to be a town hall, and it is the largest secular building on the Ringstrasse.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  10. Karlskirche Karlskirche
    10 1 hour

    Karlskirche

    Karlskirche is Vienna’s great Baroque church on the south side of Karlsplatz, but its identity is unusually theatrical: a classical portico sits between two monumental spiral-relief columns and two tower pavilions, beneath a 70-metre dome.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  11. Natural History Museum Natural History Museum
    11 2 hr 30 min

    Natural History Museum

    Naturhistorisches Museum

    Vienna’s Natural History Museum is a purpose-built nineteenth-century house of science on Maria-Theresien-Platz, not merely a container for specimens.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  12. Leopold Museum Leopold Museum
    12 2 hours

    Leopold Museum

    The Leopold Museum houses the collection assembled over five decades by the ophthalmologist and collector Rudolf Leopold, sold to the Austrian state in 1994 and opened to the public in this purpose-built home inside the MuseumsQuartier in 2001.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  13. Spanish Riding School Spanish Riding School
    13 1 hr 30 min

    Spanish Riding School

    Spanische Hofreitschule

    The Spanish Riding School is the world's oldest institution still practising classical Baroque horsemanship in its original form, tracing its riding tradition back to 1572 and its Lipizzaner breeding programme to the Habsburgs' interest in Spanish-bred horses.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  14. Hundertwasserhaus Hundertwasserhaus
    14 15 min

    Hundertwasserhaus

    Hundertwasserhaus is a private residential complex in Vienna’s 3rd district, Landstraße, at the corner of Kegelgasse and Löwengasse. Friedensreich Hundertwasser created the artistic concept with architect Joseph Krawina, and construction took place from 1983 to 1985.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  15. Musikverein Musikverein
    15 1 hour

    Musikverein

    Musikverein is Vienna’s celebrated concert building on Karlsplatz, opened on 6 January 1870 and designed by Danish architect Theophil Hansen in a neoclassical style inspired by a Greek temple.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  16. Naschmarkt Naschmarkt
    16 1 hour

    Naschmarkt

    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.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  17. Austrian National Library Austrian National Library
    17 45 min

    Austrian National Library

    Prunksaal der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek

    The Austrian National Library's Prunksaal, the State Hall, is the Baroque core of the former imperial court library, built between 1723 and 1726 by Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach, son of the architect who designed the Karlskirche.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  18. Austrian Parliament Building Austrian Parliament Building
    18 1 hour

    Austrian Parliament Building

    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.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
  19. Secession Building Secession Building
    19 45 min

    Secession Building

    Secession

    Vienna’s Secession Building is the purpose-built headquarters of an artist association that broke from established institutions in 1897. Joseph Maria Olbrich designed the white exhibition hall in 1897–98.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  20. Imperial Treasury Imperial Treasury
    20 2 hours

    Imperial Treasury

    Kaiserliche Schatzkammer

    The Imperial Treasury, the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, holds the Habsburg dynasty's crown jewels and imperial regalia inside the Hofburg's Schweizerhof, the Swiss Courtyard at the historic core of the palace complex.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  21. Sigmund Freud Museum Sigmund Freud Museum
    21 1 hour

    Sigmund Freud Museum

    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.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  22. MAK – Museum of Applied Arts MAK – Museum of Applied Arts
    22 2 hours

    MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

    Museum für Angewandte Kunst

    The MAK was the first museum of its kind on the continent, and it was founded to improve manufacturing.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  23. Mumok Mumok
    23 1 hr 30 min

    Mumok

    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.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  24. Mozarthaus Vienna Mozarthaus Vienna
    24 1 hr 30 min

    Mozarthaus Vienna

    Mozarthaus Vienna, at Domgasse 5 in the Innere Stadt, is the only one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Viennese residences still standing.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vienna
  25. Votive Church Votive Church
    25 30 min

    Votive Church

    Votivkirche

    The Votivkirche exists because somebody tried to kill the emperor and failed.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Vienna
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Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Wikidata ·

Common questions

How long should a first trip to Austria be?

Seven to ten days gives Vienna four days and leaves time for Salzburg, Innsbruck, or Graz by rail. Alpine excursions need flexible weather time and should not be treated as guaranteed additions to a tightly timed city route.

What entry documents are needed for Austria?

Austria follows Schengen entry rules, with document and visa requirements determined by nationality and route. Verify the current position through official Austrian or EU channels before departure.

What is the best way to travel around Austria?

ÖBB trains and coordinated buses link Vienna with Salzburg, Innsbruck, Graz, and other regions. Drivers need the correct motorway toll product, and some Alpine roads charge separately.

When is a practical time to visit Austria?

May to June and September suit many city-and-mountain routes, while December is a distinct winter-city period. Lift, pass, and high-road operating dates matter more than a national forecast for Alpine days.

What money and payment basics apply in Austria?

Austria uses the euro (EUR). Cards are useful, but a euro cash reserve can help at smaller establishments; review the amount and currency before approving any terminal conversion.

What practical safety details should I save for Austria?

Austria uses 112 as its general emergency line and 144 for ambulance dispatch. Its 230 V system takes Type C and F plugs. This guide holds no verified tap-water value, so leave that point unresolved until local guidance is checked.