Vienna travel guide

Top 10 sights in Vienna

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Belvedere

   Two baroque palaces in Vienna built from 1712 for Prince Eugene of Savoy. The Upper Belvedere holds Klimt's Kiss; the Austrian state treaty was signed on its balcony in 1955.

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2. 

   2© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Stephen's Cathedral

   The mother church of Vienna, begun in its Gothic form under Duke Rudolf IV in the 14th century on the site of a parish church consecrated in 1147. The south tower rises 136 metres, and some quarter of a million glazed tiles pattern the roof.

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3. 

   3© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 3.0 at

   Hofburg Palace

   The Habsburg winter residence for six centuries, and now a warren of separate visits: the imperial apartments, the Sisi museum, the silver collection, the Spanish Riding School and the treasury, which holds the imperial crown made about 962 and the lance said to have pierced Christ's side.

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   4© Andrzej Otrębski · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kunsthistorisches Museum

   Opened in 1891 to hold what the Habsburgs had accumulated, and the result is the best Bruegel collection in the world — twelve of the forty or so surviving panels, including the Hunters in the Snow. Vermeer's Art of Painting is here too, and Cellini's gold salt cellar, stolen in 2003 and recovered in a wood three years later.

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5. 

   5© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Albertina

   Museum in Vienna holding a million prints and 65,000 drawings, among them Dürer's Young Hare. It occupies the largest surviving residential wing of the Habsburg palace.

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6. 

   6© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Natural History Museum, Vienna

   The twin of the art museum across the square, opened in 1889 and still arranged largely as it was, cases and all. Its most important object is the Venus of Willendorf, an eleven-centimetre limestone figure carved some twenty-nine thousand years ago and found in Austria in 1908.

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7. 

   7© Richard Hopkins · CC BY 2.0

   Austrian National Library

   The largest library in Austria, whose State Hall of 1726 by Fischer von Erlach is one of the great rooms of Europe — eighty metres of walnut shelving under a frescoed ceiling, holding two hundred thousand volumes printed before 1850.

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8. 

   8© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Karlskirche

   A votive church begun in 1716 after a plague, with a dome and two spiral columns modelled on Trajan's in Rome. A lift installed for restoration work has been kept, so you can stand a few metres from the frescoes inside the dome.

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9. 

   9© P e z i · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

   An art school founded in 1688, whose entrance examination rejected Adolf Hitler in 1907 and again in 1908 — a decision the twentieth century has often been invited to reconsider. Its gallery holds Bosch's Last Judgement triptych.

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10. 

    10© Daniel Zupanc · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Schönbrunn Zoo

    Founded in 1752 as an imperial menagerie and the oldest zoo in the world still operating. The octagonal baroque pavilion at its centre was the emperor's breakfast room, with the animal enclosures radiating from it so he could see them all at once.

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1. 

   1© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 3.0 at

   Imperial Crypt

   The vault under the Capuchin church holding a hundred and fifty Habsburgs, twelve of them emperors, in sarcophagi that get plainer as the dynasty modernises. Maria Theresa shares an enormous double tomb with her husband; the last burial here was in 2011.

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2. 

   2© Georges Jansoone · CC BY 2.5

   Vindobona

   The Roman legionary fortress on this site, garrisoned from about AD 100, and probably where Marcus Aurelius died in 180. Its outline still governs the inner city: the Graben was its ditch, and the curve of the Naglergasse follows the northwest corner of the wall.

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3. 

   3© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Votive Church

   A neo-Gothic church on the Ringstrasse begun in 1856 as thanks for the emperor's survival — a Hungarian nationalist had stabbed him in the neck in 1853 and his collar stiffener stopped the blade. It was built with donations from across the empire.

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4. 

   4© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Belvedere

   Prince Eugene of Savoy's summer palace, two buildings with a formal garden between them. The upper one holds the largest Klimt collection in the world, including the Kiss, and the room where the treaty restoring Austrian independence was signed in 1955.

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5. 

   5© Ralf Roletschek · CC BY 3.0

   Prater

   Six square kilometres of park in the second district, imperial hunting ground until 1766 and public since. The Ferris wheel at its entrance has turned since 1897 and is the one Orson Welles rides in The Third Man, delivering the speech about the dots below.

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6. 

   6© Robert F. Tobler · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Wiener Riesenrad

   The Riesenrad is a Ferris wheel of wooden gondolas that has been turning for more than 120 years. In the course of one slow revolution the Danube and the old town pass in panorama.

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   7© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 3.0 at

   Heldenplatz

   The square in front of the Hofburg, laid out as half of an imperial forum that was never finished. Hitler announced the annexation of Austria from the palace balcony to a crowd here in March 1938, which is why the square's use is still argued over.

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8. 

   8© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Secession Building

   The 1898 exhibition hall of the artists who broke with the academy, its gilded laurel dome nicknamed the golden cabbage and the motto over the door reading: to every age its art, to art its freedom. Klimt's Beethoven Frieze of 1902 is in the basement.

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9. 

   9© C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Karl Marx-Hof

   A municipal housing block at Heiligenstadt in Döbling in Vienna, 1,100 metres long. It runs past four tram stops, which makes it the longest single residential building in the world.

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10. 

    10© böhringer friedrich · CC BY-SA 2.5

    Stephansplatz

    A square at the geographical centre of Vienna, named after St Stephen's Cathedral, among the tallest churches in the world. Until the twentieth century houses separated it from Stock-im-Eisen-Platz; since they were pulled down the two spaces have gone under the one name.

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