Austria: Ten Attractions and Natural Wonders

Empire, mountains, and music

Austria is a small country that used to run a very large empire, and much of what visitors come to see dates from that time: the palaces and museums of imperial Vienna, the baroque abbeys along the Danube, the old salt-trading towns of the Salzkammergut. The other half of the appeal is the Alps, which cover most of the west — glaciers, high passes, and ski towns.

The ten below run from Vienna in the east to Innsbruck in the west, with the lake district and Salzburg in between. The country is compact and the trains are excellent. Summer is best for the mountains and lakes; December for Christmas markets; the ski season runs roughly December to April.

1. Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna

Schönbrunn was the Habsburgs' summer palace, a baroque and rococo pile of 1,441 rooms on the edge of Vienna. The state rooms — where the emperor Franz Joseph was born and died — are the main visit, but the free gardens are half the point: a formal parterre rising to the Gloriette arcade on the hill, plus a maze, a palm house, and the world's oldest zoo still in operation, founded in 1752.

It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996 and is Austria's most-visited landmark.

2. Historic Vienna and the Hofburg

Vienna's centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a near-complete imperial capital. The Hofburg, the winter palace, is a city within a city: the imperial apartments and Sisi Museum, the Spanish Riding School with its Lipizzaner horses, the treasury with the crown jewels, and the national library's baroque hall.

Around it runs the Ringstrasse, the grand 19th-century boulevard lined with the opera house, parliament, city hall, and the twin Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches museums. The Belvedere, with Klimt's The Kiss, is a short walk south.

3. St Stephen's Cathedral

The Stephansdom, in the middle of Vienna's old town, is the city's emblem: a Romanesque and Gothic cathedral first dedicated in 1147, with a 136-metre south tower — the "Steffl" — that can be climbed, and a famously colourful roof of 230,000 glazed tiles. Below, the catacombs hold bones moved from the city's cemeteries after they closed during a plague outbreak in 1735.

The square outside is the natural centre of the city.

4. Salzburg

Salzburg grew rich on salt and on the near-absolute power of its prince- archbishops, who left it a compact baroque old town of churches, squares, and palaces below a huge medieval fortress, the Hohensalzburg, begun in 1077. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (since 1996), Mozart's birthplace (his house on Getreidegasse is a museum), and, for many visitors, The Sound of Music pilgrimage — the Mirabell gardens, the lake palaces, the abbey.

The fortress, reached by a funicular since 1892, is the best viewpoint. The old town is small enough to see on foot in a day.

5. Hallstatt and the Salzkammergut

Hallstatt is a village of tall houses crammed onto a narrow ledge between a lake and a cliff, so short of flat ground that bones were once exhumed from its cemetery to make room for new burials, and painted skulls are displayed in a chapel. Above it, a salt mine has been worked since prehistoric times — the early Iron Age Hallstatt culture is named after the place. A funicular leads up to the mine and the view.

Hallstatt is very small and draws roughly a million visitors a year; the wider Salzkammergut lake district — Bad Ischl, the Wolfgangsee, the Traunsee — is quieter and just as pretty.

6. The Grossglockner High Alpine Road

This toll road, opened in 1935, switchbacks over a high pass in the Hohe Tauern National Park, with numbered hairpins and viewpoints along the way. A spur runs out to the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, a terrace looking straight at the 3,798-metre Grossglockner and the Pasterze, Austria's longest glacier — which is visibly shrinking year by year.

The road is normally open only from early May to the end of October, and it is a destination in itself: allow half a day, watch for marmots and ibex, and expect weather to change fast.

7. Melk Abbey

Melk is a working Benedictine monastery, founded in 1089, rebuilt between 1702 and 1736 to designs by Jakob Prandtauer as one of the great baroque buildings of central Europe: an ochre pile on a bluff over the Danube, with a gilded church, a frescoed Marble Hall, and a library rich in medieval manuscripts.

It stands at the upstream end of the Wachau, and the classic combination is to tour the abbey, then take a boat or cycle the riverside path downstream through the vineyards.

8. Innsbruck

Innsbruck sits in a broad valley with the Nordkette range rising almost sheer above the rooftops — the Nordkette cable car climbs from the city to Hafelekar at about 2,270 metres. The old town has the Golden Roof, an oriel window roofed in 2,657 gilded tiles, the imperial palace and Court Church (with Maximilian's grand empty tomb), and the Bergisel ski jump, rebuilt to a design by Zaha Hadid in 2003.

It hosted the Winter Olympics twice, in 1964 and 1976, and it is the easiest city in Austria from which to be on a mountain within half an hour.

9. Hohenwerfen and the Eisriesenwelt

About 40 kilometres south of Salzburg, the 11th-century Hohenwerfen fortress stands on a crag above the town of Werfen, with daily falconry displays that fly eagles and vultures over the valley. On the mountainside opposite is the Eisriesenwelt, the largest ice cave in the world — more than 40 kilometres of passages, of which only the first kilometre, the part open to visitors, is covered in ice.

The cave opens from May to late October and is reached by a walk and a cable car that shortens the climb.

10. The Wachau and Dürnstein

The Wachau is a 36-kilometre stretch of the Danube between Melk and Krems where the river cuts through terraced vineyards, apricot orchards, and small wine villages — a UNESCO cultural landscape since 2000. Its prettiest town is Dürnstein, with a powder-blue abbey church and, on the crag above, the ruined castle where Duke Leopold V held Richard I of England prisoner in 1192 on his way back from the Third Crusade.

The valley is made for cycling (a flat riverside path runs the whole way), for river boats, and for a night in a Heuriger wine tavern.

Austria is a country that can be covered by train from a couple of bases — Vienna and Salzburg, or Vienna and Innsbruck — with everything on this list within a half-day's reach of one or the other.