Country
14 cities and towns
Austria is not the cheapest country in Europe, but budget travelers can make it work with free city walking tours, affordable supermarket meals, and a well-connected rail network. Many of the best experiences cost nothing: wandering historic old towns, hiking marked alpine trails, and swimming in clean public lakes in summer. The combination of Alpine scenery, imperial architecture, and world-class culture makes it worth the effort to plan around the higher prices.
Where to go
Each one with what it costs to spend a day there.
Franz Joseph signed Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia at Bad Ischl on July 28, 1914, sitting in the Kaiservilla where he had spent every summer for 60 years. That document set the First World War in motion. Bad Ischl's story goes far deeper than its spa town surfaces suggest.
The opera stage at Bregenz floats on Lake Constance with no roof, and performances proceed as long as there is no lightning. The Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival) runs every July and August with a different production each year, mounted on a stage that can accommodate sets of extraordinary scale, and the backdrop is the lake and the Swiss Alps.
Feldkirch has one of the best-preserved medieval town centers in western Austria, a place where the Altstadt (old town) with its arcaded streets and the Schattenburg castle above it have survived largely intact. Most visitors to Vorarlberg go to Bregenz and miss Feldkirch entirely, which is a real navigational error.
Graz is Austria's second-largest city and the least internationally known of the three, which is the main reason to go. The Schlossberg, the forested rock at the center of the city with its clock tower and funicular, shapes the urban geography in a way no other Austrian city has.
One of the most photographed villages in the world. UNESCO World Heritage. Clinging to Hallstatter See beneath cliff faces. 7,000 years of salt mining. The Hallstatt period of the Iron Age is named after this village. Salzwelten Hallstatt, Hallstatt Museum, Hallstatt Beinhaus, Hallstatt Skywalk.
The Nordkette, a 2,334-meter mountain ridge, is visible from the Innsbruck city center and reachable by cable car in 22 minutes. This single fact explains Innsbruck's appeal: it is a functioning city with Habsburg architecture, good restaurants, and a university, and the moment you step outside you can see exactly where the mountains begin.
Klagenfurt is Carinthia's capital and the city at the eastern end of the Wörthersee, one of the warmest lakes in the Alps. The Strandbad Klagenfurt on the lake is one of the largest freshwater lidos in Europe, with extensive green space and bathing infrastructure that gives the city a distinctly Mediterranean summer quality.
Krems an der Donau is the eastern gateway to the Wachau Valley, a small wine city on the Danube with a medieval old town and the starting point of the Wachau bike path.
Linz spent most of the 20th century as Austria's industrial capital, a steel and chemical town on the Danube with a difficult World War II history as a city Hitler favored for monumental redevelopment plans.
Salzburg is the city where the Counter-Reformation built its most complete surviving expression: a Baroque ensemble of cathedral, residences, churches, and abbey that still reads as a coherent program, not just a collection of individual buildings.
Steyr's Stadtplatz, the main market square, is surrounded by Gothic and Renaissance facades that form one of the most coherent pre-Baroque urban ensembles in Austria. The Bummerlhaus on the corner, a late Gothic town house from around 1497, gives the square its most distinctive profile.
Vienna is both a city and a Bundesland, one of three city-states in Austria alongside Vienna-as-a-state, which is to say it governs itself without a surrounding state structure. As a state-level entry in the RA destination hierarchy, it serves as the parent for Vienna City (the full city content lives there).
Villach sits at the crossroads of three countries in a way that is geographically unmistakable: the railway lines to Italy, Slovenia, and northern Austria all converge here, and the city has been a transit junction since the Roman road system ran through the same spot.
Zell am See has the rare quality of being genuinely attractive in both summer and winter rather than just functional in one and tolerated in the other.
Coverage of Austria is still thin. The full list is here.
Browse all places