5 Days in Graz

Start where Graz shops for food, at the farmers' market on Kaiser-Josef-Platz, next to the opera house. Farmers from around the city sell apples, cheese, eggs, smoked ham and the thing Styria is famous for: Kürbiskernöl, pumpkin seed oil, dark green and nutty, pressed from roasted seeds of a pumpkin grown here without shells. Buy a bottle with the protected-origin seal and a number on the neck.

Have breakfast at one of the stands: a coffee and a Krapfen, or a slice of farmhouse bread with Verhackert, a spread of minced smoked bacon and lard that's much better than it sounds. One of the market's food stalls, the Genießerei am Markt, won a Michelin star in 2026.

Walk ten minutes west to the Hauptplatz, the main square, where trams cross in front of the town hall and the Archduke Johann fountain. Look up at the Luegg house on the corner, covered in baroque stucco, and at the clock tower on the rock above the rooftops. The sausage stands on the square are an institution: a Käsekrainer at any hour.

From here, Herrengasse, the grand main street, runs south. At number 3, the Painted House has a facade covered in frescoes of gods and heroes from 1742.

A few doors down, step through the arch of the Landhaus, the Styrian parliament, into its courtyard: three stories of Renaissance arcades built in the 1550s and 60s by the Italian architect Domenico dell'Allio, one of the most beautiful courtyards north of the Alps. In summer it's used for concerts; at Christmas it holds a nativity scene carved from ice.

Next door is the Landeszeughaus, the Styrian Armoury, the largest historic armoury in the world, with about 32,000 weapons and pieces of armor on four floors, exactly as they were stored around 1700. Styria was on the front line against Ottoman raids, and when the alarm came, the armoury could equip thousands of men in a few hours. Walking between the rows of helmets, breastplates, muskets and pikes is unsettling and impressive at once.

There are three ways up the Schlossberg. From Schlossbergplatz, the Kriegssteig zigzags up the rock face in 260 steps, cut during the First World War by prisoners of war. Next to it, a glass lift runs 77 m up a shaft inside the hill. And from the river, the Schlossbergbahn funicular has climbed the slope since 1894.

Take the stairs up and come down the fast way: the Schlossberg Slide, a 175 m tube slide that corkscrews 64 m down inside the rock and is billed as the world's tallest underground slide. It takes about 40 seconds and is ridiculous fun at any age.

The Schlossberg was once a fortress that nobody ever took: the Ottomans never tried, and Napoleon's troops besieged it in 1809 without success. It was handed over only on paper, under the armistice and peace treaty that year, and the French blew it up. The people of Graz paid a ransom to save two towers, and the Uhrturm, the clock tower, has been the symbol of the city ever since. Look at its face: the long hand shows the hours and the short one the minutes, because for a long time it only had an hour hand, and it needed to be big enough to read from the town.

Wander the paths over the top, through gardens and old bastions. The Glockenturm, the bell tower, holds the Liesl, a bell cast in 1587 that rings 101 times at 7am, noon and 7pm. On the way, look for the Turkish Well, a 94 m shaft dug through the rock in the 16th century so the fortress could survive a siege, and the stone lion of Major Hackher, who defended the hill against the French in 1809. The small Graz Museum Schlossberg tells the hill's story. Find a spot at the Bürgerbastei for the best view over the roofs.

Stay on the hill for sunset. The terrace of the Schlossberg restaurant looks out west over the whole city to the hills of the Plabutsch, and it's the place for a first glass of Styrian wine: a Welschriesling or a Sauvignon Blanc from the south of the province, where you'll be on day four.

In summer, the Kasematten, the old fortress cellars, have become an open-air stage for concerts and opera, under the night sky.

Come down into the old town for Styria's favorite dish: Backhendl, chicken pieces breaded and fried until crisp, with a lemon wedge and potato salad dressed with pumpkin seed oil. Even better is the Backhendlsalat, warm strips of fried chicken on a green salad, with that same oil poured over the top.

Ask locals and they'll send you to the Landhauskeller, in the old vaulted cellars of the Landhaus, or the Stainzerbauer. The Landhauskeller is closed on Sundays.

Graz Cathedral was built in the 15th century as the court church of Emperor Frederick III, who carved his mysterious motto, AEIOU, all over it; nobody is sure what the five letters meant. On the outside wall, the faded Gottesplagenbild of 1485 shows the three plagues that hit Graz in 1480: locusts, the Black Death and the Ottomans.

Next to it, the domed Mausoleum of Ferdinand II, begun in 1614, is one of the finest early baroque buildings in Austria. Ferdinand was the archduke who grew up in Graz, became emperor and led the Catholic side into the Thirty Years' War. He's buried here with his first wife, and his mother lies in the sarcophagus in the crypt, under a ceiling later decorated by the young Fischer von Erlach.

Across the road, the Burg, the old castle of the Habsburgs, is now the office of the Styrian government, and its courtyard is open to all. In the corner tower is a small marvel: a Gothic double spiral staircase from 1499, two stone staircases twisting around each other, which separate on every floor and meet again. It's called the "staircase of reconciliation", since two people who've quarreled can take different stairs and meet at the top.

Behind the Burg, the Burggarten, the old palace garden, is a quiet place to sit for a while.

On Hofgasse, the former court bakery, the Hofbäckerei Edegger-Tax, has the most beautiful shopfront in Graz: a carved dark wood portal from 1896 with the Habsburg double eagle in gold. The bakery was first recorded in 1569, on Sporgasse round the corner, and has been here since 1880. Buy a Kipferl or a slice of strudel and eat it as you walk down towards the river.

Walk down to the river, where the Murinsel, a floating island of steel and glass shaped like a half-open shell, sits in the fast-flowing Mur, joined to both banks by footbridges. The New York artist Vito Acconci designed it for the Capital of Culture year in 2003, with a café and a small amphitheater inside.

Locals have mixed feelings about it, and it's more of a photo stop than a destination, but cross the river on it rather than on the bridge. The Mur here is a mountain river, cold and green, coming down from the Alps.

On the right bank, the Kunsthaus Graz looks like a huge blue sea creature that has crawled out of the river and settled among the old houses. The British architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier designed it for 2003 and called it the "friendly alien", and the name stuck. Its skin is acrylic glass, with nozzles on top pointing at the Schlossberg to let in light, and after dark the side facing the river becomes a giant low-resolution screen of fluorescent rings.

Inside, it shows contemporary art, with exhibitions that change several times a year. Go up to the glass gallery at the top, the "needle", for the view across the river to the clock tower.

Walk north into Lend, the old suburb on the right bank. It was the poor side of town for centuries, and in the last 20 years it has become the city's creative and multicultural quarter, with design shops, small galleries and the best cheap food in Graz. The Lendplatz has a farmers' market every morning except Sunday, ringed by cafés and stalls.

Have lunch in one of the small places around the square, or at Zur Steirerstub'n, a family-run Styrian inn on the Lendplatz with a view of the clock tower. On Mariahilferstrasse, the Minorite church of Mariahilf rises with its two towers. On a warm evening, the Lendplatz is where students and young families sit outside until late.

Back in the old town, be on Glockenspielplatz at 6pm. In a window high on one of the houses, a pair of wooden dancers in Styrian costume come out and turn to a tune played by 24 bells, as they have since 1905. It also happens at 11am and 3pm.

The square and the lanes around it, Mehlplatz and Färbergasse, are the old heart of Graz's nightlife, a cluster of bars locals call the Bermuda Triangle, though these days the younger crowd often heads across the river to the Lendplatz. Start with a beer at the Glöckl Bräu and follow the students from there.

Schloss Eggenberg is the most important baroque palace in Styria, and a riddle in stone. Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg, the emperor's chief minister and the richest man in Inner Austria, began it in 1625 as a model of the universe: it has four corner towers for the seasons, 365 windows for the days of the year, 24 state rooms for the hours of the day and night, and 52 windows on the state floor for the weeks.

The tour takes you through all 24 rooms, with their original painted ceilings and porcelain, ending in the Planetary Hall, with paintings of the planets and the signs of the zodiac by Hans Adam Weissenkircher. The palace and its park have been a UNESCO site, together with the old town, since 2010. In the same building are the Old Gallery, with medieval and baroque art, and a coin collection.

Around the palace, the park was turned into an English landscape garden in the 19th century, and today it belongs to the peacocks: dozens of them, blue and white, wandering across the lawns, sitting in the trees and screaming. Look for the Planet Garden, a modern garden laid out around the same cosmic ideas as the palace, and the Archaeology Museum at the edge of the park, where the bronze Strettweg Cult Wagon, from the 7th century BC, is the star.

Back in the center, try the strangest and most Styrian dessert there is: vanilla ice cream with pumpkin seed oil poured over it, often with a few roasted pumpkin seeds on top. The oil tastes of toasted nuts, and with the ice cream it works far better than it has any right to. The Eis-Greissler on Sporgasse makes a pumpkin seed oil flavor of its own.

Archduke Johann, the Habsburg who loved Styria more than Vienna, married a postmaster's daughter and became its local hero, founded the Joanneum in 1811, and it's the oldest public museum in Austria. Its new home, the Joanneumsviertel, opened in 2011 between two old palaces, with an entrance through glass cones that lead down into an underground foyer.

Pick what you like: the Neue Galerie, with Austrian art from the 19th century to now, including Schiele and Kokoschka, or the Natural History Museum, with minerals and fossils from the Styrian mountains. Your Eggenberg ticket from the morning covers it.

Kastner and Öhler, the grand old department store on Sackstrasse, has a free roof terrace with a café, closed on Sundays like the shop. Take the lift to the top floor for a view straight across the red roofs to the clock tower on one side and the blue Kunsthaus on the other, with a coffee or a spritzer in hand.

For dinner, go for the dishes you only find in Styria. Steirisches Wurzelfleisch is pork simmered with root vegetables and served with fresh horseradish; Käferbohnensalat is a salad of big, purple-speckled runner beans with onions, vinegar and, of course, pumpkin seed oil. There's also Sterz, buckwheat or corn meal cooked and crumbled in lard, which farmers once ate three times a day, and Klachlsuppe, a sour pork soup.

Locals recommend the Stainzerbauer, the Landhauskeller, Die Herzl, a wine tavern on Prokopigasse, and Der Steirer, a modern Styrian bistro and wine bar just across the river on Belgiergasse.

Ehrenhausen is a small baroque market town on the river Mur at the start of the wine road. On the wooded hill above it, the Mausoleum of Ruprecht von Eggenberg, a general of the Turkish wars from the same family that built the palace you saw yesterday, is guarded by two giant stone warriors, and the interior was finished by Fischer von Erlach.

Walk up past it for the first view of the vineyards, which start right behind the town and run south to the Slovenian border.

The road climbs along the ridge between Ehrenhausen and Leutschach, in places running right along the border, with Austria on one side of the road and Slovenia on the other. The vineyards are some of the steepest in Europe, and on the hilltops stand Klapotetz, tall wooden wind rattles that clatter in the wind to scare the birds away from the grapes from summer until the harvest.

Walk a stretch of one of the marked paths between the vines, or let the WEINmobil take you from one viewpoint and winery to the next. This is the land of Sauvignon Blanc, and the best producers here are among the best in the world for it.

A Buschenschank is a farm tavern where winemakers serve their own wine with cold food they make themselves, a right that goes back to a decree of Joseph II in 1784; a bunch of pine branches over the gate means it's open. The Dreisiebner Stammhaus, right on the wine road in Sulztal, and Tinnauer, above Gamlitz, are two family-run ones. Order a Brettljause, a wooden board of smoked ham, bacon, sausage, Verhackert, cheese, horseradish and dark bread, with a Käferbohnensalat on the side, and a glass of Welschriesling, light and fresh, or Sauvignon Blanc.

In September and October, ask for Sturm, the cloudy, half-fermented new wine, sweet and fizzy and stronger than it tastes, with roasted chestnuts. This is the season the whole of Graz drives down to the wine road at the weekend.

On the way back, stop near Gamlitz, the biggest wine village on the road, where several of the big names of Styrian wine have their cellars and tasting rooms, among them Sattlerhof and Lackner-Tinnacher, both a few kilometers outside the village. Taste the range, from the light, fresh Steirische Klassik wines to the single-vineyard Sauvignons and Morillon, as Chardonnay is called here, and buy a bottle or two to take home. Then catch the bus or the WEINmobil down to the station at Ehrenhausen for the train back to Graz.

In a quiet wooded valley north of Graz, the Austrian Open-Air Museum has collected about 100 old farmhouses, barns, mills and chapels from every province of Austria, taken apart and rebuilt here since 1962. The path through the valley, about 2 km long, runs roughly from east to west across the country, from the Pannonian plain to Vorarlberg, and you walk from a thatched cottage to a Tyrolean wooden farmstead in an afternoon.

Many houses are furnished as they were, with smoky black kitchens and painted cupboards, and on some days there are craftsmen at work. It's the best place to understand how most Austrians lived until a hundred years ago.

Halfway through the valley, the museum's inn, Zum Göller, is itself an old inn moved here from Lower Austria and opened in 2016, and it serves country dishes from every Austrian province: soups, roast pork, a farmer's platter and Kaiserschmarrn, the torn pancake with plum compote. Sit outside under the trees if the weather's good, and ask for a glass of cider from Styrian apples.

Back in Graz, walk through the Stadtpark, the city park, laid out in the 1870s on the old fortifications that once ringed the town, between the old town and the university quarter. It's where Graz jogs, reads and walks the dog, past fountains and the Forum Stadtpark, the old park café that artists took over in 1959 and turned into a center for new art and literature.

At its eastern edge, the little Leechkirche is the oldest church in Graz, built in the 13th century by the Teutonic Knights, with Gothic stained glass. Further on, the neo-Gothic Herz-Jesu-Kirche has the third-highest church tower in Austria.

For the last night, have dinner in one of the old beer halls of the center, where Graz drinks its own beer: Puntigamer, brewed in the south of the city, or Gösser, from the Styrian town of Leoben. The Gösser Bräu on Neutorgasse is loud, friendly and serves the classics: Wiener Schnitzel, Tafelspitz, roast pork with dumplings and Backhendl.

Then take a last walk along the Mur promenade, through the old Franciscan quarter by the river, with the clock tower lit up on its rock above you.