Bregenz

People lived at the foot of the Gebhardsberg in the early Bronze Age, and in the 5th century BC the Celtic Brigantii fortified Brigantion here, one of their strongest sites. Rome took it in 15 BC; Brigantium became a municipality around 50 AD, with a forum, temples, market halls and the Roman admiralty for Lake Constance, and remains of a theatre were found in excavations in 2013 and 2019. The Alemanni sacked the town in 259/60, and the better-protected upper town was rebuilt as a fort guarding the frontier on the Rhine and the lake. The missionaries Columbanus and Gall worked here in 610–612.

From 917 the counts of Bregenz ruled from its castle, and around 1170 Hugo of Tübingen, of the Montfort line, founded the walled town on the upper terrace. The Habsburgs bought it in 1451 and 1523. Swedish troops occupied it in the Thirty Years' War and blew up the Hohenbregenz fortress in 1647, and from 1805 to 1814 it was Bavarian. In 1726 it became the main seat of Austrian administration in Vorarlberg, and the parliament has met here since 1861.

The harbour was built from 1842, Austrian lake shipping began in 1884, and the railway arrived in 1872, crossing the Arlberg from 1884. Allied bombing destroyed 72 houses in 1945, and French troops ran the military government after the war. In 1946 the first Bregenz Festival was held, and from 1949 opera was staged on the lake. The Social Democrat Michael Ritsch was re-elected mayor in 2025.

Bregenz has a far richer cultural life than its size suggests. The Bregenz Festival, played on the world's largest lake stage, is its signature: a new production every two years, and an audience that reached 400,000 over the two summers of Carmen in 2017 and 2018. The Festspielhaus beside it hosts orchestral concerts and the Bregenzer Frühling dance festival, and the Kornmarkt square has its own jazz festival each June.

Contemporary art and architecture are the other strands. Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus, opened in 1997 with James Turrell, belongs to what locals call the Kulturmeile, the culture mile, with the vorarlberg museum and the Landestheater, and the Künstlerhaus in the Palais Thurn und Taxis shows living artists. The city shares Vorarlberg's confidence in modern building in glass and wood.

Daily speech is Alemannic, close to Swiss German and famously hard for other Austrians to follow, and people look west to Switzerland and Germany across the lake as much as east to Vienna. A memorial stone in the lakeside gardens recalls local resistance to a planned nuclear reprocessing plant in Bavaria, and the city's handball and football clubs, A1 Bregenz HB and SC Bregenz, have loyal followings.

About 29,000 people lived in the main part of the city at the start of 2026, with a few hundred more in hillside Fluh. Bregenz is only the third-largest town in Vorarlberg, after Dornbirn and Feldkirch, but its built-up area with Hard, Lauterach, Wolfurt and neighbouring villages is more than twice the size of the city, and a ribbon of settlement increasingly joins it to Dornbirn in an urban area of well over 100,000.

As the state capital it is home to the parliament and most of Vorarlberg's authorities, and its economy is made up largely of services, trade and industry, including the hosiery maker Wolford and the fittings manufacturer Julius Blum. Tourism comes in two seasons, with the festival in summer and the Pfänder in winter.

The city has grown from the upper town down to the lake and then south-west, where Rieden and Vorkloster grew up and post-war housing filled the plain of Weidach. Summer life moves to the water — the promenade, the Pipeline beaches and the old wooden Mili bath.

Bregenz eats the food of Vorarlberg, in which cheese and other dairy products play a major role. Käsespätzle — soft egg noodles layered with grated cheese and fried onions — is the everyday dish, and the Bregenz Forest behind the city runs a cheese road of dairies making Bergkäse, a hard mountain cheese with a strong, sometimes nutty taste, alongside the sharp, semi-hard Räßkäse.

Riebel, maize and wheat semolina cooked in milk to a firm mash, was traditionally eaten for breakfast across Vorarlberg, and Öpfelküachle, apples baked in pancake dough and topped with sugar and cinnamon, are a simple sweet. Vorarlberg has its own breweries, among them Fohrenburg in Bludenz, and a fruit schnapps sometimes ends a meal.

The streets around the Kornmarkt hold most of the traditional inns, while the lake promenade has its terraces and beach bars. Near the harbour, one of the last eight mushroom-shaped Milchpilz kiosks still sells milk drinks, and the hillsides behind the upper town were once covered with vineyards and orchards held from the Counts of Montfort.