Vienna Destination Guide

With its Habsburg history and love of classical music and opera, Vienna established itself very early on as a sophisticated metropolis.

It has for centuries attracted travellers to walk its clean cobbled streets beneath the weight of its pretty palaces, and among the music of brilliant artists like Gustav Mahler and Mozart somehow buzzing in the ether. It is a place where coffee is revered and there are hundreds of cafés, famous or otherwise, to show for it.

Vienna stands in high regard to other European cities for its well-organised public transportation system and its usage of bikes in the city centre. Its CityBike scheme allows you to hop on a public bike and explore for a small fee, but the city is so manageable you can see it all on foot.

Take a break from classical Vienna and explore its modern art at the MUMOK and MAK museums. There are river and canal tours that give you a good lay of the land, which are best to be experienced in the spring and summer. Outdoor summer music festivals thrive here, as do open-air markets selling everything from exotic fruits to 2nd edition copies of Proust. But summer is not the only time to come, as travellers note when they happen to pass through during Christmas time. The city is teaming with jolly Christmas markets, like the Spittelberg along the old Biedermeier houses. Do not leave without trying some of Vienna’s remarkable street food, which is essentially Frankfurter, which you find nowadays influenced, like the city itself, by Slavic, Greek, and Turkish migrations.