🇦🇹 Austria · Vienna and the East (Lower Austria)
Few European cities have reinvented themselves as decisively as Linz. For decades it was known above all as an industrial, steel-making city on the Danube, with a grey image tied to its steelworks. But towards the end of the 20th century the city bet heavily on culture, art and technology, and turned itself around spectacularly: today it is one of the world capitals of digital art, a Unesco City of Media Arts and a surprising destination for anyone looking for an Austria beyond the imperial postcard.
The Danube is the axis of everything. On one bank lies the old town, presided over by the enormous Hauptplatz with its baroque Trinity column, the pedestrian streets, the castle on the hill and the two cathedrals. On the other bank, above all at night, shine the two buildings that symbolise the new Linz: the Ars Electronica Center, the 'museum of the future' with its colour-changing façade, and the Lentos, the modern art museum lit up above the river. Between the two banks, the bridges and the riverside walks invite you to stroll.
This guide covers the essentials of Linz in a practical, friendly way: the monumental square and the old town, the museums that put it on the cultural map, the classic tram that climbs the Pöstlingberg, the cathedrals and the walks along the Danube. Linz is a human-sized city, easy to get around, where the historic legacy lives alongside one of the most interesting art and technology scenes in Europe, and where there is always a good coffee with its famous Linzer Torte.
Linz has very ancient roots: in Roman times there was a settlement here called Lentia, a post on the Danube that controlled the river crossing. The present name appears in documents in the Middle Ages, when Linz grew as a trading town thanks to its strategic position on the routes linking southern Germany with the Balkans and to its river port on the Danube. In 1490 it was raised to the status of capital of Upper Austria. The city enjoyed a moment of splendour at the end of the 15th century when Emperor Frederick III set up his residence here and died in Linz in 1493. In the 17th century, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler lived and worked in Linz, where he formulated part of his laws of planetary motion; the local university now bears his name. During the 19th century the city industrialised and was connected by rail. The darkest chapter came with Nazism: Adolf Hitler, who had spent his youth in Linz, dreamed of turning it into one of the 'Führer cities' and planned great works for it and a gigantic cultural complex that was never completed; during the war the great steelworks (today's voestalpine) were built, along with a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the war and the reconstruction, Linz carried the image of a polluted factory city. The great transformation came from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, with the bet on culture: in 1979 Ars Electronica was born, a pioneering festival of art and technology that became the city's hallmark. The process culminated in Linz being named European Capital of Culture in 2009 and a Unesco City of Media Arts in 2014. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the country: the imperial Habsburg capital with its Ring and its palaces, the Danube and the Wachau valley, and Linz, the industrial city marked by its Nazi past. This is where Austria was born as a state and where its history beat for a thousand years.
Read the history of Vienna and the East (Lower Austria) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The origins of Linz go back to Roman times. Where the city stands today there was a settlement called Lentia, a fortified post on the Danube that formed part of the limes, the northern frontier of the Roman Empire that followed the course of the great river. Lentia controlled a strategic point: a ford or crossing of the Danube used by the routes linking southern Germania with the provinces of the empire. The name 'Lentia', probably from an earlier Celtic root, survived and became today's 'Linz'.
After the fall of Rome and the turbulent centuries of the migrations, the place remained inhabited because of its value as a river crossing. In the early Middle Ages, Linz appears in documents as a crossing point and market. Its position on the Danube — the great commercial motorway of central Europe — and at the meeting of land routes running from southern Germany towards Bohemia and the Balkans made it a trading hub. The town grew around its river port, its fairs and the tolls and storage rights on goods carried along the river.
During the Middle Ages, Linz obtained town and market privileges, and its commercial importance kept growing. The trade in salt (which came down from the Salzkammergut), in iron and in other goods passed through its wharves. That vocation as a trading river town, built on the Danube crossing, would shape its character for centuries.
Through the late Middle Ages, Linz established itself as one of the main towns of the region 'above the Enns' (Oberösterreich, Upper Austria). In 1490, as part of a reorganisation of the Habsburg territories, Linz was raised to the status of capital of the part of the archduchy of Austria lying above the river Enns, that is, of the future Upper Austria. It was recognition of its economic weight and of its central position in that part of the country.
Medieval Linz reached its moment of greatest political importance thanks to Emperor Frederick III of Habsburg. In his final years, the elderly Holy Roman Emperor effectively moved his residence to Linz, settling in the castle that dominated the town. During that brief period, at the end of the 15th century, Linz worked as a kind of improvised imperial capital, a centre from which Frederick's vast dominions were governed. The emperor died in Linz in 1493, which left its mark on the memory and on the castle of the city.
That period raised the prestige of Linz and left as a legacy the castle (the Linzer Schloss), which would in time be rebuilt and extended. Although the Habsburg centre of power would shift definitively towards Vienna, Linz kept its rank as regional capital of Upper Austria, a role it still holds today.
One of the brightest chapters in the history of Linz is its link with one of the fathers of modern astronomy: Johannes Kepler. The German mathematician and astronomer lived in Linz for several years, in the first decades of the 17th century, working as a teacher and as mathematician in the service of the estates of Upper Austria.
It was precisely in Linz that Kepler developed a fundamental part of his work. There he completed and published works key to understanding the movement of the planets, among them the formulation of his third law of planetary motion, which relates the orbital periods of the planets to their distances from the Sun. He also worked in Linz on his great work of cosmic harmony and on astronomical tables. The city was thus the setting for some of the most important scientific advances of its time.
They were, however, difficult years for Kepler: the Counter-Reformation and the religious tensions of the age, the conflicts that would lead to the Thirty Years' War and personal troubles (such as the famous witchcraft trial against his mother, whom he had to defend) marked his stay. Even so, Kepler's legacy remained tied to Linz for ever, to the point that the city's public university now bears his name: the Johannes Kepler Universität (JKU).
The 19th century transformed Linz profoundly. The Industrial Revolution reached the Danube and the city, with its port and its position at a crossroads, became a manufacturing and transport centre. An early milestone was the construction, around 1832, of one of the first railways on the European continent, the horse-drawn line that linked Linz with Budweis (České Budějovice), in Bohemia, to carry salt and goods. In time, modern steam railway lines connected Linz with Vienna and Salzburg, bringing it into the Austrian network.
The city grew in population and industry, with textile, chemical and metalworking factories that made use of the energy and the river transport. Linz stopped being only a trading town and began to be an industrial city too, an identity that would deepen in the 20th century.
At the same time, Linz was a cradle and a stage for music. The great composer Anton Bruckner, born in nearby Ansfelden in 1824, was closely tied to the city: he was organist at the Old Cathedral (Alter Dom) in Linz for years, before moving to Vienna, and left a deep musical mark on the region. His memory is still present in Linz, which devotes musical institutions and a modern concert hall to him (the Brucknerhaus, on the bank of the Danube) as well as a festival, the Brucknerfest. The composer is buried at the nearby abbey of St. Florian, where he was also organist.
The 20th century brought Linz its darkest chapter. Adolf Hitler had spent part of his childhood and youth in Linz and in nearby Leonding, and he always regarded the city as his home town. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany (the Anschluss of 1938), Hitler drew up grandiose plans to turn Linz into one of the 'Führer cities', with monumental public buildings and a gigantic cultural and museum complex (the so-called 'Führermuseum') that he intended to fill with art looted across Europe. Most of those plans were never carried out.
What was built, with tragic consequences, was an enormous steel plant (the Hermann-Göring-Werke, today the voestalpine company), constructed for the regime's war machine using forced labour. Subcamps of the Mauthausen concentration camp system operated on the outskirts, and thousands of prisoners and forced labourers suffered and died in appalling conditions. The city was also heavily bombed for its industrial value during the Second World War.
After the war, Linz lay inside the occupation zone — for a few years the Danube marked the border between the American and Soviet zones — and faced a long reconstruction. The steel industry, reorganised as voestalpine, drove the economic recovery and provided jobs and prosperity, but it also tied Linz to an image of a grey, polluted factory city that would mark it for decades and that the city set out to overcome from the 1970s onwards.
From the 1970s onwards, Linz undertook one of the most successful urban reinventions in Europe. Determined to leave behind its image as a polluted industrial city, it bet on culture, art and technology as a new engine of identity. The founding milestone of that bet was the birth, in 1979, of the Ars Electronica festival, an event that was a world pioneer in the meeting of art, technology and society. Out of that initiative would come, in time, the Ars Electronica Center (the 'Museum of the Future') and the Prix Ars Electronica, one of the most prestigious awards in digital art.
The city invested in cultural infrastructure: the Brucknerhaus (a concert hall beside the Danube), the Lentos museum of modern art, the renovation of the Schlossmuseum in the castle, and the transformation of the riverbanks into a cultural axis. It also worked hard to improve its environment, cutting the pollution that had defined it, until it became an example of urban clean-up.
International recognition came in stages. In 2009, Linz was European Capital of Culture, which gave enormous visibility to its arts scene and consolidated its new image. In 2014, Unesco named it a City of Media Arts, within its Creative Cities Network, in recognition of its world leadership in digital art. Almost nothing remains of that grey industrial city in the public imagination: the Linz of today is a cultural and technological capital that looks to the future without giving up its history.