Language · 11 published
Country guide
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.
Reviewed by Elena Voss · Roavina Travel Editor
Every city catalogued in this country so far, ranked by how much there is to see.
Photograph · Andrzej Otrębski · CC BY-SA 4.0
Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.
11 places match
Category
Typical visit duration
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…
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.
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.
Volksgarten is a public park in Vienna's Innere Stadt, laid out between 1821 and 1823 on land cleared after Napoleon's troops demolished part of the city's fortifications in 1809.
Wiener Blick
Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Wikidata ·
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
