🇦🇹 Europe
Imperial Vienna, Salzburg and the Austrian Alps: classical music, palaces and mountains for every season.
Austria is a small country with an enormous past: for centuries it was the centre of the Habsburg empire, which ruled half of Europe, and Vienna kept the urban scale of an imperial capital in a city that today has fewer than two million people. That explains the palaces, the opera, the coffee houses with five-metre ceilings and a density of classical music that no other place in the world can match: Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Strauss, Mahler and much of Beethoven worked here.
The other half of the country is the Alps, which cover almost two thirds of the territory. There the trip changes completely: valleys with timber villages, crystal-clear lakes in the Salzkammergut, cable cars that climb above three thousand metres and a mountain culture lived all year round, with skiing in winter and hiking in summer. Going to Austria and staying only in Vienna means missing half of it.
For the Latin American traveller it has two concrete advantages. One is logistical: it sits in the centre of Europe, and from Vienna you can reach Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, Munich and Venice by train in a few hours, so it fits naturally into a multi-country trip. The other is that Austria has a working holiday agreement with Argentina, with two hundred places a year for young people aged 18 to 30, which makes it one of the gateways into Europe for a longer stay.
The local currency is the euro (EUR). Carry some cash, tell your bank before you travel and check the day's exchange rate.
Full converter for EUR →Vienna (VIE) is the main gateway, with the City Airport Train and the S-Bahn into the centre; Salzburg (SZG) and Innsbruck (INN) serve the Alps. ÖBB trains are punctual and comfortable: Vienna–Salzburg takes about two and a half hours and Vienna–Innsbruck a little over four. Austria is also the hub of Europe's night train network: ÖBB's Nightjet services leave Vienna for Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands, and they save you a night's accommodation. In the alpine valleys, where the train does not reach the Postbus does, timed to connect with the rail schedules. The Klimaticket, the annual transport pass, only makes sense for long stays.
Austria has two clearly separate high seasons and that is the first thing to decide. Summer, from June to September, is the best time for the Alps: the trails are open, the cable cars are running, you can swim in the lakes of the Salzkammergut and Carinthia, and the cities have open-air festivals. July and August are the busiest months in Hallstatt and Salzburg. June and September give you almost the same thing with far fewer crowds, and September usually has the clearest air for mountain views.
Winter is the other season, from December to March, and the country reorganises itself around the snow: the ski resorts open, the alpine villages fill up and prices in Tyrol and Salzburg rise a lot, especially at Christmas, New Year and the European February holidays. December adds the Christmas markets of Vienna and Salzburg, among the loveliest in Europe, which run from mid-November until Christmas. The shoulder seasons, November and mid-April to May, are the cheapest, but in the mountains many cable cars and hotels close for maintenance.
Austrian cooking is the cooking of the empire, so it borrows from half of central Europe. The original Wiener Schnitzel is veal, thinly breaded and fried in butter, and if it is pork the menu has to say so because it cannot use the same name. There is also Tafelspitz, a boiled beef dish that was Emperor Franz Joseph's favourite, goulash inherited from Hungary, the sausages from the street stands that stay open until dawn and, in the mountains, Kasspatzln and Kaiserschmarrn, a shredded pancake with sugar and compote eaten as a main course after a hike.
The pastry is a chapter of its own and probably the best thing in the country: the chocolate Sachertorte with apricot jam, apple strudel, the Linzer Torte, which is the cake with the oldest written recipe on record. It goes with coffee, and it is worth knowing that ordering 'a coffee' means nothing: you have to choose between a Melange, a Verlängerter, an Einspänner or a Kleiner Brauner, among many others. To drink, Austrian white wine is excellent and little known abroad, above all the Grüner Veltliner from the Wachau, and in the Heurigen on the outskirts of Vienna you drink the house's new wine with a plate of cold cuts, at shared tables in the open air.
Austria is one of the safest countries in the world and Vienna always appears among the European cities with the lowest crime. The incidents that affect travellers are pickpockets on the Vienna metro, around the cathedral and in the packed Christmas markets, and little else. A classic Vienna scam is the street sellers of concert tickets dressed in period costume: they are not from the official halls, they overcharge and they seat you badly. Emergencies, 112; and in the mountains, alpine rescue is 140.
The health system is first rate and expensive without cover, so travel insurance is essential; for the Schengen visa you are required to have a minimum cover of thirty thousand euros. The real risk in the country is the mountain, not crime: alpine weather changes fast, you have to check the forecast before setting out, follow the trail markings and not underestimate the altitude or the cold even if it is twenty degrees down in the valley. In winter, skiing off-piste without a guide is the most common cause of serious accidents, and it is worth checking that your insurance covers mountain rescue, which many policies exclude. If you plan to hike in wooded areas, ask about tick-borne encephalitis.
Austria is expensive, in the same range as Germany and below Switzerland. As a guide, and not as official data because none exists for these items, a dorm bed usually runs from thirty to fifty euros, a mid-range hotel from one hundred to one hundred and sixty, a dish in a simple restaurant between fifteen and twenty-five euros and a coffee in a historic Vienna café between five and seven. In the ski resorts in high season, accommodation can double those figures, and the daily lift pass is a big expense to budget for separately.
What helps most to bring the cost down is transport. Vienna has 24, 48 and 72-hour passes that cost far less than single tickets, and ÖBB trains booked in advance have Sparschiene fares well below the flexible ones. If you are staying for weeks, the Klimaticket covers all public transport in the country. Markets such as Vienna's Naschmarkt, the sausage stands and the restaurants' lunchtime set menu, considerably cheaper than the evening menu, take care of meals. And many of the state museums are free for under-19s.
Austria is formal, more so than Germany. Titles matter and are used when introducing yourself; the usual greeting between strangers in the countryside and the mountains is Grüß Gott, and answering it goes down well. Punctuality is taken for granted, rubbish is sorted in buildings and people speak quietly on public transport. One detail that surprises visitors: in restaurants and cafés you are not expected to sit wherever you like, you greet people as you come in and you often share a table. Tips are rounded up, between five and ten per cent, and you say the total amount when paying rather than leaving coins on the table.
Do not confuse Austria with Germany or assume they are the same thing, which is one of the few things that genuinely annoys people; they speak German but with their own accent and vocabulary, and Austrian identity is a sensitive subject. The same goes for history: Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 and for decades presented itself as the first victim rather than a participant, a debate the country only took on seriously in the 1980s and 1990s. Vienna has Holocaust memorials and the Judenplatz museum, and they are visited with the same seriousness as in Germany. Beyond that, social life revolves around music, coffee and, in the mountains, the habit of greeting everyone you pass on a trail.
The history of Austria is the history of a crossroads: a corridor of mountains and valleys along the Danube through which, for three thousand years, almost every people and every current in Europe has passed. Here, in a small Alpine village called Hallstatt, archaeologists found a site so revealing that Europe's first Iron Age is named after it: the Hallstatt culture. On those salt mines rose the Celts and their kingdom of Noricum, then the legions of Rome with their cities of Carnuntum and Vindobona, and later the Bavarians, Charlemagne and the eastern march that gave the country its name. Ostarrîchi, "the realm of the east", is first written down in a document from the year 996.
But if one family name sums up Austria, it is Habsburg. From the moment Rudolf I won the crown in 1273 and his son settled on the Danube in 1282, this family ruled Austria for more than six centuries and came to wear the imperial crown of half of Europe, not so much through war as through marriage: "let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry". Vienna withstood two Ottoman sieges (1529 and 1683), was the capital of a multinational empire, the cradle of Mozart and Haydn, the setting of the Congress that reordered Europe in 1815 and of the dazzling, contradictory Vienna of 1900 — the Vienna of Freud and Klimt, but also of the political antisemitism that fascinated the young Hitler. The shot fired in Sarajevo in 1914 sank the empire; the Anschluss of 1938 wiped the country off the map and made it both accomplice and victim of Nazism. Austria came back into existence as a neutral state with the Treaty of 1955. Travelling through it today — from the salt of Hallstatt to the palaces of Vienna, from the lakes of the Salzkammergut to the peaks of Tyrol — means walking through that dense, brilliant and often tragic history at the very heart of Europe.
Read the full history of Austria →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
These are the sources we cite most across this country's guides, with how many times each appears. Hard data —tickets, opening hours, requirements, transport— comes from the official source and carries the date we checked it. Restaurant and hotel picks come from guides and reviews, and we say so on each page.
