Alpine & Central Europe
Austria
An imperial capital with a small country attached, most of it vertical.
- Capital
- City
- Destination
- Austria
Austria spent six centuries as the seat of an empire and then lost it in an afternoon, which is why Vienna is a capital built for twice the country. Everything west of it is mountain: ski resorts in winter, high pasture in summer, and lakes cold enough to hurt. The coffee house, the opera and the Sunday hike are all still institutions rather than attractions.
Getting around
ÖBB trains are punctual and the Railjet crosses the country in four hours. Mountain valleys have postbuses timed to the trains. Vienna's transport is cheap and the annual pass is famously a euro a day.
When to come
Vienna is a year-round city and best in the shoulder months. The Alps have two seasons and a gap between them: lifts and mountain huts close in April–May and again in November.
Worth knowing
- In a coffee house you are buying the table, not the coffee; nobody will rush you.
- Mountain huts (Hütten) need booking and cash, and lights go out early.
- Sunday closing is near-total outside stations and tourist areas.
At the table
- Wiener Schnitzel, veal and beaten thin, with potato salad
- Kaffee und Kuchen, an afternoon institution with its own vocabulary
- Wine from the Wachau and Burgenland, which nobody outside expects
Travel regions
3 editorial regions, each opening onto its cities.
Region
Vienna & the East
The imperial capital, the Danube valley's vineyards, and Hungary's old border country.
Region
Salzburg & the Salzkammergut
A prince-archbishop's baroque city, and a district of seventy-six lakes behind it.
Region
Tyrol & the West
The alpine heart: Innsbruck between two ranges, and valleys of huts and high paths.
Popular destinations
The destinations we have written most about, which is not the same as the ones most people go to — and is the only ranking we can honestly compute.
Vienna
Habsburg on the outside, Freud and Klimt and social housing on the inside, with the world's best-funded music scene.
Innsbruck
A university city at 574 metres with a 2,300-metre mountain reachable from the centre in twenty minutes.
Salzburg
Baroque built on salt money, under a fortress, with Mozart born in the middle of it.
Hallstatt
A lakeside village under a salt mountain, with 7,000 years of continuous mining and more visitors than it can hold.
Dürnstein & the Wachau
A blue baroque tower over the Danube, terraced vineyards behind, and the castle where Richard the Lionheart was held.
Experiences here
A sample of what is listed across Austria.
Standing room at the Staatsoper
A few euros, queued for on the night, in one of the great opera houses. Bring a scarf to tie to the rail and hold your place.
A heuriger on the city edge
Wine taverns in Vienna's own vineyards, open only when the grower has wine to sell — a pine branch over the door means open.
Into the salt mountain
Miners' slides, a salt lake underground, and the Bronze Age tools that came out of the same shafts.
City to summit in twenty minutes
Tram, funicular and two cable cars take you from a café table to 2,256 metres of exposed ridge; take a jacket you would not think you needed.
Journeys through Austria
The Journey Planner holds all 5 of these destinations and the real distances between them. It opens on 8 days, which is the shortest stay this atlas records for each of them added up — change the length, the month, the budget or the pace and build it again.
Stories set here
Fixed points in the year
The record
What we hold about Austria, where each figure came from, and when it was last checked. The score says what this country is for, not how good it is — it is useful once you are already interested and is not a reason to be.
- Capital
- Vienna
- Currency
- EUR — euro
- Languages
- German
- Population
- 8,877,067 (2019) — Natural Earth 1:50m admin 0 countries
- ISO codes
- AT · AUT
- Time zone
- CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)
- Membership
- European Union, Schengen area, Uses the euro, European Economic Area
- Typical day
- €85–190 per person
- Best months
- June, July, August, December, January, February
- Quieter months
- May, September, October
- Facts checked
- not verified why this matters
Europe Experience Score
How this is calculated — derived from our own tagging, not from measurement. It says what a place is for, not how good it is. The tick on each bar is the median across the whole Atlas, so a bar short of it is a dimension this place is not for.