Vienna, Lower Austria & Burgenland

The Danube made this corner of Austria a frontier long before it was a capital. Rome fortified the river with a legionary camp at Vindobona, beneath today's Vienna, and a larger town at Carnuntum, further downstream, where Marcus Aurelius wrote part of his Meditations. The name Austria first appears in a deed of 996 for land at Neuhofen an der Ybbs. The Babenberg margraves moved their seat down the Danube by way of Tulln and, around 1155, to Vienna, and the ransom paid for Richard the Lionheart, held at Dürnstein in 1192–93, built the new town of Wiener Neustadt.

Rudolf of Habsburg won the country by defeating Ottokar of Bohemia on the Marchfeld in 1278, and Vienna was his dynasty's residence for most of the next 640 years. After the Ottoman siege of 1683 failed, court and church rebuilt in Baroque: the Belvedere, Schönbrunn, the Karlskirche, and Melk and Göttweig above the Danube. The walls came down from 1857 for the Ringstrasse, and by 1910 Vienna held over two million people. Burgenland was then the German-speaking fringe of Hungary, where the Esterházy princes employed Haydn at Eisenstadt.

The empire's fall in 1918 left Vienna an outsized capital. It became a federal state of its own at the start of 1922 and, as "Red Vienna", built more than 60,000 council flats before the civil war of February 1934. Burgenland was transferred from Hungary in 1921 without its natural capital, Sopron, which voted to stay Hungarian. After the Anschluss of 1938 Vienna's Jews, nearly a tenth of the city, were robbed, expelled or murdered, as were Burgenland's Jews and most of its Roma. The Allies occupied Vienna until 1955, and the Iron Curtain ran along the region's northern and eastern edges until 1989, when hundreds of East Germans broke through it at the Pan-European Picnic near Sopron on 19 August. Lower Austria, long governed from Vienna, chose St. Pölten as its capital in 1986.

Vienna's manners are an inheritance from the court. Titles are used — Herr Doktor, Frau Magister — the waiter in an old coffeehouse is addressed as Herr Ober and brings a glass of water with every cup, and the local humour, the Wiener Schmäh, delivers charm and insult in the same soft dialect. The city holds a long season of balls between New Year and Lent, from the Opera Ball to those of the coffeehouse owners, the confectioners and the hunters, and an evening at the State Opera or the Musikverein, standing room included, is an ordinary pleasure rather than an occasion.

The Heuriger belongs to this region more than to any other. Vienna has some 600 hectares of vines inside the city limits, and in Grinzing, Nussdorf and Stammersdorf, as in every village of the Weinviertel and the Wachau, a grower's tavern hangs out a pine bush when it is ausg'steckt — open — for a few weeks at a time. Lower Austrians place themselves by four quarters: the Weinviertel of wine, the Waldviertel of forest, the Mostviertel of pear cider and the Industrieviertel south of Vienna. The great monasteries — Melk, Göttweig, Klosterneuburg, Zwettl, Heiligenkreuz — still own land, make wine and run schools, and on St. Leopold's Day, 15 November, visitors to Klosterneuburg slide down a giant 18th-century wine barrel for luck.

Burgenland is the least conventionally Austrian of the three: Hungarian until 1921, with villages of Croats who settled after the Ottoman wars of the 16th century, Hungarian-speakers around Oberwart and Oberpullendorf, and the highest Protestant share in the country. Many Croatian and Hungarian villages have bilingual place-name signs, and the patron saint, Martin, is honoured around 11 November with roast goose and the first tasting of the new wine.

Vienna has passed two million inhabitants again, a level last reached in the 1910s, and is one of the largest German-speaking cities; about a third of its residents hold a foreign passport. A large share of the Viennese live in council or subsidised flats, which keeps rents below those of other capitals and explains much of the city's standing in quality-of-life rankings. Lower Austria has 1.7 million people, many of them in the commuter belt of Klosterneuburg, Mödling and Baden, yet its capital, St. Pölten, has only 60,000; Wiener Neustadt has 49,000 and Krems 25,000. Burgenland has just over 300,000, and Eisenstadt, with about 15,000, is Austria's smallest state capital.

Vienna works in government, banking, universities and conferences, and hosts the United Nations, the IAEA, OPEC and the OSCE. The plain south of the city towards Wiener Neustadt is the country's oldest industrial belt, with the airport and the refinery at Schwechat; the Marchfeld to the east is Vienna's vegetable garden; and the Waldviertel, short of jobs, has been losing its young for decades. Burgenland, once Austria's least developed state and a recipient of EU development funds after 1995, now lives from wine, thermal spas, commuters from Hungary, the outlet centre at Parndorf and the wind turbines on the plain beside it, which now supply much of the state's electricity.

Shops close by early evening and all day Sunday. Viennese summers are spent on the Danube Island, the bathing beaches of the Old Danube and at the Heuriger; winter brings the Christmas markets and the balls. The arguments of the day are rents and summer heat in a growing Vienna, and the water level of Lake Neusiedl, which fell to a very low level in the drought of 2022.

Viennese cooking is an imperial collage: goulash from Hungary, a breaded cutlet with cousins in Milan, and the flour-based sweets called Mehlspeisen, shared with Bohemian cooking — Buchteln, yeast buns filled with plum jam, Powidltascherl, plum-jam turnovers, and Palatschinken, thin pancakes. The place to eat it is the Beisl, the wood-panelled neighbourhood tavern, whose menu runs to Backhendl, fried chicken, Zwiebelrostbraten, beef under fried onions, and offal such as Beuschel, a ragout of veal lung and heart. The Würstelstand sells Käsekrainer, a sausage oozing cheese, into the small hours. At the Heuriger the buffet offers Liptauer, a paprika cheese spread, dripping on bread and cold roast pork with Wiener Gemischter Satz, a field blend of white grapes grown and pressed together.

The Wachau lives on two crops. Its apricots — Marillen — ripen in July for dumplings, jam and schnapps, and its terraced Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners are graded by ripeness as Steinfeder, Federspiel and Smaragd, the last named after the green lizard of the vineyard walls. Langenlois in the Kamptal, the Weinviertel's peppery Veltliner and the Zierfandler and Rotgipfler of Gumpoldskirchen fill out the wine map. The Waldviertel grows grey poppy seed for Mohnnudeln, potato noodles rolled in poppy and sugar, and raises carp for Christmas; the Mostviertel presses perry; and the Marchfeld's asparagus opens the spring.

Burgenland cooks with a Hungarian accent: Fogosch, pike-perch from the lake, fish soups red with paprika, Bohnenstrudel filled with beans, Grammelpogatscherl, crackling scones, and the Martinigansl, roast goose with red cabbage. Its reds are Blaufränkisch from Mittelburgenland, the Leithaberg and the Eisenberg, and Zweigelt from Gols; around Rust and Illmitz autumn mist off the lake makes botrytis sweet wines, Ruster Ausbruch among them; and the far south makes Uhudler, a strawberry-scented wine from American vines that was banned until the early 1990s.

Inside Vienna's Ringstrasse lie St. Stephen's Cathedral, the Albertina and the Hofburg, with the imperial treasury, the Spanish Riding School and the National Library's Baroque hall; on the boulevard stand the State Opera, the Kunsthistorisches Museum with its Bruegels, parliament and the Burgtheater. Just outside are the MuseumsQuartier and the Leopold Museum's Schieles, the Secession with Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, the Karlskirche and the Naschmarkt; further out, the Belvedere, Schönbrunn with its Gloriette and zoo, the Prater's giant wheel of 1897, the Hundertwasser House, the Central Cemetery with the graves of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, and the Kahlenberg on the edge of the Vienna Woods.

The Wachau valley, a World Heritage landscape since 2000, follows the Danube for 36 kilometres between Melk, where Prandtauer's abbey stands on its bluff, and Krems, with its medieval Steiner Tor and the lanes of Stein; between them are the castle ruin of Aggstein, Willendorf, where the 30,000-year-old Venus was found in 1908, Spitz, Weissenkirchen, Dürnstein and, across the river, Göttweig Abbey. Nearer the capital are Klosterneuburg Abbey with its 12th-century Verdun Altar, the spa town of Baden, Heiligenkreuz and Mayerling in the Vienna Woods, the rebuilt Roman quarter of Carnuntum and the floodplain forest of Donau-Auen National Park. To the south the Semmering Railway of 1854 climbs towards the Rax and the 2,076-metre Schneeberg; to the north lie moated Heidenreichstein, Zwettl Abbey and Thayatal National Park on the Czech border.

Lake Neusiedl, shared with Hungary, is a steppe lake for sailing, windsurfing and a cycle circuit, and the salt pans of the Neusiedler See–Seewinkel National Park at Illmitz draw avocets, spoonbills, geese and great bustards. The wine villages of Burgenland ring the lake and run south: Rust with its storks, Mörbisch and its lake stage, Purbach's cellar lane, Gols, and Deutschkreutz and Horitschon in Blaufränkisch country. Eisenstadt has Schloss Esterházy, with its Haydn Hall, and the composer's tomb in the Bergkirche; Forchtenstein Castle and the Roman quarry of St. Margarethen are close by.