Vienna travel guide
The sophisticated Viennese enjoy what is known as the Wiener Lebensart, a cultured appreciation of all life’s pleasures. Not only is this reflected in Vienna’s glorious art, music and architecture, theatres and coffee houses, and its passion for glittering balls, but where else would you find vineyards within a city’s limits?
Places to visit in Vienna
One of the world’s great cities, Vienna never fails to charm its visitors, not only with an incomparable heritage of Habsburg history, art and architecture, beauty and musicality, but with that untranslatable quality of Gemütlichkeit, a mixture of cosiness and amiable hospitality, best experienced in a traditional coffee house or wine tavern. Now with a population of around 1.7 million, fewer than when it was the centre of a great empire, Vienna is large enough to be a true metropolis but small enough to be easily understood and explored.
The city is laid out at the point where the Danube flows through the gap between the Alps to the west and the Carpathians to the east. In the shape of the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods), the easternmost foothills of the Alps descend through forests and vineyards to the very edge of the city, where old wine villages like Grinzing have kept their rustic character. Within the Ringstrasse, the great semi-circular boulevard laid out in the 19th century, the old core of the city is compact enough to be explored on foot. The famous Hofburg, the rambling city palace of the Habsburgs, is matched by its out-of-town equivalent Schloss Schönbrunn, Vienna’s glorious answer to Versailles.
