The 15 best things to do in Vienna
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The shy and retiring Austrian city has got its attitude back and is now moving to a new beat, as maverick architects, bohemian foodies and spray-can radicals take to the streets. With a clutch of grande dame hotels – and a recent five-star opening that had the neighbourhood talking – it’s easy to see why travellers put this city top of their European bucket list. Here we round up the best things to do in Vienna right now.
Kollektiv FischkaTake home an artisanal souvenir
Vienna, you may notice while strolling around spotting vintage shop signs, all gold-lettered typography, is a city that still appreciates the handmade and the family-run. There isn’t a Robert Dyas or Pret on every corner. Small, independent shops haven’t been pushed to the outskirts. So maybe you’re in the mood for a monogrammed pillowcase or napkin set, in which case open the doors at Zur Schwäbischen Jungfrau on Grabenstrasse, which once made bed linen for the Habsburgs; current owner Hanni Vanicek continues the tradition from her 8th district studio.
At its atelier on Kärntner Strasse, meanwhile, J&J Lobmeyr has been mouthblowing and hand-engraving chandeliers and stemware since 1823, collaborating with designers including Ilse Crawford and illuminating restaurants such as Bob Bob Ricard in London’s Soho. If you can’t squeeze a chandelier into your suitcase, how about a pair of crystal Champagne glasses? One of my favourite addresses, though, is Jarosinski & Vaugoin in the Neubau district, Vienna’s last surviving silversmith. Headed by the dapper, sixth-generation owner Jean-Paul Vaugoin, its atelier is a working museum of cutlery and tableware fashions over the past two centuries. Knives, forks, salt cellars and even tiny cocktail picks are hand-beaten and polished, making their way (hand-delivered, naturally) to tables around the world. Jean-Paul is full of fascinating stories – did you know, for example, that forks used to have three prongs but this changed to four as the devil’s trident had three? He’s just the person you need next time you’re at a state banquet and unsure as to which spoon to use.
Websites: zsj.at; lobmeyr.at
Getty ImagesHead out on an architecture safari
Vienna tends to get typecast as a periwigged wonderland, full of neoclassical palaces and baroque pomp, but that’s not the whole picture. In the 19th century, the city of Freud and Jung started exploring its experimental side and modern landmarks were built, including Otto Wagner’s beautiful art nouveau church at Steinhof, with its gold-plated copper plates, and the golden cabbage of the Secession building, built in 1898 and a hangout for Klimt and friends. The latter caused a lot of controversy, as did later works by my favourite moustachioed early modernist, Alfred Loos. An opponent of needless decoration, he was forced to add window boxes to his pioneering, stripped-down Loos Haus on Michaelerplatz, now a bank.
More fun is the dinky Loos American Bar, which still serves cocktails amid a glorious, geometric assemblage of mahogany, brass and onyx – while for a glimpse into his domestic designs, the Emil Löwenbach apartment he created in 1913 near the Urania has recently opened for Saturday tours. Any architectural safari of the city should also include Zaha Hadid’s incredible, cantilevered library at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Hans Hollein’s postmodern Haas Haus – controversial in the 1980s – which reflects St Stephen’s Cathedral in its glass facade.
But if you only have time for one building, make it the Kunst Haus Wien, created by Friedensreich Hundertwasser in 1991 and recently renovated to make it more sustainable. Like the architect and ecologist’s Hundertwasser House and Village nearby, it resembles architectural crazy paving – a jumble of coloured glass, metal, brick, wood and ceramic tiles, sprouting a biophiliac flurry of plants and shrubs. It features around 260 plant species, including 10 ‘tree tenants’ waving their branches out of the windows.
Websites: loosbar.at; architekturerbe.at; kunsthauswien.com
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Geschichte HalleGo back in time at the Wien Museum Karlsplatz
Yes, another museum – you’re in Vienna for the culture as well as the schnitzel, right? This opened at the tail end of 2023 to house the city’s own collective history, shuffling its contents in new exhibitions and reframing it with an important gender rebalance. The architecture itself is pretty interesting, as the original museum wasn’t demolished but had a new facade floating around it (take note, other architects), with a glass-fronted entrance looking out over the church on Karlsplatz. Unusually for Vienna (and taking a cue from the UK), its permanent collection has free entry, so you can dip in and out for an hour or two. Like London’s Natural History Museum, there’s a whale dangling in the air in one of the rooms – though in this case it’s Poldi the wooden whale, who used to hang above a fish restaurant in the Prater park. During my last visit, I found Beethoven’s death mask, an excellent scale model of imperial Vienna, a mixing desk for creating soundscapes for historic paintings, a statue of a unicorn looking rather pleased with itself and some strikingly colourful kinetic artworks by female artist My Ullmann. You will probably uncover something completely different.
Address: Karlsplatz 8, 1040 Wien, Austria
Website: wienmuseum.at
AlamyGet arty at the Museumsquartier
We’ve got the Habsburgs to thank for so much grand-scale venue space in Vienna – their former imperial stables are now home to the city’s main art hub, known as MQ and containing nine main museums. And while there are other galleries in town, this is the place to head if you have limited time on your hands and a preference for modern and contemporary art. The Leopold, with its white-cube architecture, is a favourite for its works from the modernist Vienna of the early 20th century, with a large collection of fleshy Schiele paintings, several by Klimt (though The Kiss can be seen at the Belvedere museum) and bold-lined Wiener Werkstätte designs. MUMOK, meanwhile, is a brilliantly curated contemporary gallery that with its dark basalt silhouette resembles an alien spaceship. Renovated in 2024, it reopened with a huge new mural by South Korean artist Jongsuk Yoon in the foyer – the rest of the collection flips between modern and contemporary art movements, drawing together Pop Art from Warhol and Claes Oldenburg along with works by Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Duchamp and Rauschenberg as well as a growing collection of photographic and video works. At ZOOM, meanwhile, children up to the age of 14 can get experimental with animation, painting and glue, with an ocean-themed room for younger children complete with water grotto, mirror tunnel and a ship’s deck. Insider tip: take the lift to the top of the Leopold Museum for a rooftop drink.
Address: Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien, Austria
Website: www.mqw.at
AlamyCool off in the Danube
In recent hot summers, when temperatures sizzled upwards, there’s only one thing to do: find some cold water and jump into it as soon as you could. There’s a few ways of doing this in Vienna. You could pack your swimming costume and head to one of several private swimming pools such as the smart Schönbrunner Bad, in the grounds of the grand Schönbrunn Palace, or KrapfenwaldBad, which has the best views over the city but can get crowded. There’s also a healthy lido culture, best experienced at Gänsehäufel, a little island on Alte Donau (that’s the Old Danube) that has wave machines, splashy children’s playgrounds, a diving pool, tree cover and lots of access to the river itself – with entry points lined with flat stones so you don’t have to wade through gloopy mud. And the Alte Donau itself, which once formed part of the river but is now a lake (get there via the U1 metro), is great for hiring a pedalo, SUP or boat – try Marina Hofbauer or Eppel – which you can then jump off from. If you want to channel Wham!’s ‘Club Tropicana’ video, hire one of the ‘island’ pedalos with ladders at the back and tropical foliage to sip cocktails among. Vienna’s Pier 22, on the right bank of Danube Island in the Donaustadt district, opened in time for summer 2024 – it’s a lovely new lido-style waterfront with swimming ladders, sunbathing areas, picnic spots and food trucks. Just the place for a family day out.
Getty ImagesGo for a ride in the Wurstel Prater
Most amusement parks are generally to be avoided by all but the masochistic but not the Prater. It’s set amid tree-shaded greenery – great for cycling around, so consider bike hire – on what was once the Habsburg’s hunting ground and is home to the famous Riesenrad, the giant, 65-metre-high ferris wheel built in 1897 and which played a leading role in The Third Man (and lesser-celebrated 007 film The Living Daylights). And while there are many modern rides that spin you round and drop you from dizzy heights, the park generally has a gentle, vintage character – a little like Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens. Vintage lovers should seek out antique rides such as the pony carousel, the denim-clad cowboy hedgehogs of the Fifties-era Mecky Express, the Liliputbahn from the 1920s and one of the world’s oldest ghost trains, dating to 1948. Entrance is free but take cash as you’ll need it to buy tokens for rides and games. In 2024, a museum devoted to the park’s 250 years of history was given a brand new home right in the heart of the park. Prater Museum is a show in its own right, full of brilliant mementos and fragments, including parts of a grotto ride, posters and early slot machines – as well as some deeply sinister characters such as the Punch and Judy figures and the grinning gentleman by the vintage Watschenmann ‘test your strength’ machine. See if you can spot Mozart and Conchita Wurst in the enormous ‘Where’s Wally’-style illustration of the park here. Amusement park aficionados should also seek out Böhmischer Prater, which is quieter and well pitched for younger children.
Address: Wurstel Prater, 1020 Vienna, Austria
Website: getyourguide.co.uk
Getty ImagesDrink wine in a Viennese vineyard
Remember all that fuss about hygge? The Viennese have long had their own version of affable cosiness, Gemütlichkeit, best experienced in one of the city’s heurigen, or wine taverns. Much has been written about the city’s café culture, but heurigen are just as central to the Viennese character – little snapshots of the 17th and 18th centuries, they tend to be wood-lined dens with vine-covered courtyards and, more often than not, moustachioed men in lederhosen playing accordion and fiddles. Traditional, yes, but also long-standing champions of vine-to-glass drinking, much of it biodynamic. Vienna is the only capital city in the world with serious vineyards within the city limits and with Austrian wine the best it’s ever been, that goes for Viennese varieties too. In central Vienna, visit the vaulted Gigerl and order a glass of Zweigelt red or citrusy Gemischter Satz along with a plate of local sausage, pickles, sauerkraut and cheeses – but this should only serve as a primer for the real experience further out. The 38 tram drops you in Grinzing, for example, a short walk from village vineyards such as Mayer am Nussberg where tables and loungers are set in the fields during the summer for long, slow wine-tasting with views over the city.
LONDON FILMS / AlamySee The Third Man at the cinema
For such a classic city, there are surprisingly few globally known films set on its streets, but two will always linger in the mind. Richard Linklater’s 1995 indie hit Before Sunrise is a compellingly slow-burn girl-meets-boy romance set across a single day before Jessie (Ethan Hawke) flies back to the USA. Easy enough to take a self-guided walking tour through most of its locations – from Schallplattenhandlung record shop to Maria-Theresien-Platz – though some have changed. And while Carol Reed’s film-noir The Third Man (a sprightly 75 years old in 2024), is constantly referenced in relation to Vienna, have you actually seen it? Would you recognise the zither theme by Anton Karas, and be able to recite Orson Welles’ famous Cuckoo Clock speech in the Prater Park ferris wheel? If that means nothing to you or everything, go and see it: it’s regularly shown at the lovely little Burg Kino cinema, right on the Ringstrasse not far from the opera house.
Address: Burg Kino, Opernring 19, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Website: burgkino.at/movie/third-man
Getty ImagesTake a tour of the city by tram
Every city has a bus or tram route that acts as an unofficial guided tour. London has the 73 bus route from Stoke Newington to Victoria, which takes in Hyde Park and other central hits; in Vienna it’s all about the red-and-white Tram D. Rattling between the 10th and 19th districts, from the main station to what are almost villages (Vienna can get rural surprisingly quickly). Stepping on at the Hauptbahnhof, the route takes you past Belvedere palace – baroque former residence of Prince Eugene and now home to an impressive art collection – onto the Ringstrasse and past the State Opera then onward past the Burgtheater and Parliament to the 9th district with its clusters of independent hipster shops. You could alight here or stay on and see the fortress-like Karl Marx Hof, an enormous social housing project built in the 1930s by a student of Otto Wagner. Stay on till the end of the line and you can get off and walk to Mayer am Pfarrplatz, a wine tavern where Beethoven once drank. Not bad for two euros 30, though it’s best to pick up a Vienna City Card if you’re planning on seeing a lot of the city – available for 24, 48 or 72 hours.
Getty ImagesMeet the Habsburgs in an underground crypt
There’s an underground world in Vienna, ranging from the sewers seen in The Third Man, which can be visited on tours at times, and the catacombs lurking below St Stephen’s Cathedral – a series of crypts dating back to the 14th century including ossuaries of neatly stacked bones that you can peep into. The best show curated by the grim reaper, though, can be found at the Capuchin Crypt below the tiny wood-lined Santa Maria church near Neuer Markt in the city centre. This is where most of the Habsburg dynasty ended up after shuffling off this mortal coil – 149 of them, spanning four centuries, with the remains of empresses and queens, Holy Roman emperors and princes residing in elaborate sarcophagus. Some of the remains anyway – they tended to be distributed between three separate crypts, omnipresent in death as well as life. Particularly fine is the tomb of Marie Theresa and Franz Stephan, decorated with scenes from their life along with the requisite grinning death’s head wearing a crown. Ideal for any designers of Iron Maiden or Sepulchre album covers, this is wonderfully macabre – a memento mori history lesson into Austria’s imperial past.
Address: Capuchin’s Crypt, Tegetthoffstraße 2, 1010 Wien, Austria
Getty ImagesGet regal at Schönbrunn Palace
The 19th-century Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, more affectionately known as Sisi, has always been a royal pin-up in Austria, her face adorning chocolate boxes and tea towels, but is having even more of a moment right now. Heralded as an undiscovered feminist icon by some, and the Princess Di or Meghan Markle of her time by others, she’s the subject of two films and a brace of TV series, including 2022 Netflix show The Empress, depicting her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph I aged just 16. So the palace where she lived feels particularly pertinent right now, despite being one of the city’s most obvious attractions. You could time your visit to coincide with one of the markets held in the palace courtyard for Christmas, New Year and Easter, or for one of the summer concerts held by the Wiener Philharmoniker in the Orangery, where Mozart and Salieri used to perform. But otherwise, get here early and spend most of the day exploring the grounds and palace, perhaps even filming your own recreation swirling beneath the Gloriette arches and around the Neptunbrunnen fountain. Built in the middle of the 18th century, this is Vienna’s Versaille, a Baroque masterpiece.
Getty ImagesDo a figure of eight in winter
Vienna’s a beautiful city to visit during the winter, full of cosy cafés to stay warm in over a creamy hot chocolate (try for a seat at Cafe Schwarzenberg) and hearty, rib-sticking food such as gulasch and tafelspitz. For a snapshot of sheer winter-wonderland delight, head to the Town Hall Square which, between January and March every year, is turned into a meandering ice skating park known as the Viennese Ice Dream. It’s evolved over the years and now runs over two levels, linked by icy runways around the trees, with DJs and live music, and a small winter market selling punch, tea and snacks. Several smaller rinks spiral off the main ones, including one for young children – those whose technique involves clutching onto the side and making flailing forays out and back may be tempted to use these too. Book ahead online to avoid the queue – there are lockers for bags and shoes. You could try this in summer, too, of course, but may get a few odd looks.
Address: Wiener Eistraum, 6965+3J, 1010 Wien, Austria
Website: wienereistraum.com
AlamyGo on a street-art safari along the Donau Canal
Yes, Vienna has the Danube, the blue Danube, but it also has the Donaukanal, a stretch of water (not a canal) that breaks off the main river, moseys around town and then rejoins the Danube in the east. And for those who still think Vienna is all about neoclassical architecture and opera, here’s the flipside. Walking or cycling along its banks you’ll see one of the biggest urban canvases for street art, sprayed on walls and under bridges and drawing international names, along with summer pop-up beach bars (Tel Aviv beach bar for house, Adria for a more indie vibe) and sound systems, community gardens and the Donaukanaltreiben Festival in June. Look out for the Motto am Fluss restaurant next to the little port from where hydrofoils glide off to Bratislava, the Badeschiff Wien with its onboard swimming pool, the Zaha Hadid Haus and the dome of the Urania Observatory. Or just make like the locals and sit on the edge with a beer, legs dangling over the water.
Geoff Williamson SuperPrime / Alamy Stock PhotoSee a concert in Konzerthaus
As the city of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, Vienna has some of the best buskers in the world, many of them having trained at a classical conservatoire, while walking down the street you’ll hear snatches of opera and strains of violin floating out of windows. You may also be stalked by touts in Mozart wigs and red waistcoats selling tickets for tourist concerts but ignore them and buy tickets for the Konzerthaus instead. While the State Opera or Musikverein, home to the Philharmonic, are the obvious choices, the Konzerthaus is set in an equally beautiful Art Nouveau building and is a little less known to visitors. It opened in 1913 with a specially written work by Strauss and has kept the standard up ever since, with a programme that mixes classical with jazz and contemporary.
Address: Konzerthaus, Lothringerstraße 20, 1030 Wien, Austria
Getty ImagesGo shopping in Burggasse
Vienna is divided into various numbered districts, and the 7th is one of the best areas to go shopping in, dipping into the various independent shops and then heading to a bar or café afterwards. It’s close to the Museumsquartier, so you can head here after a culture fix – it’s particularly good for vintage, as well as contemporary Austrian design. Highlights include Burggasse 24, a café/bar with an extensive vintage clothing collection, Uppers & Downers, which curates vintage fashion along with new accessories and shoes, and the Eigensinnig Wien concept store, which has its own-brand, all-black clothing label. Other favourites are Die Sellerie for stationery, ceramics and art prints, and the Wine Rebellion shop for a different kind of Austrian label.