5 Days in Vienna

St. Stephen's, the Stephansdom, is the middle of Vienna in every sense: the old city grew around it, distances from Vienna used to be measured from it, and locals call it simply Steffl. Most of what you see is Gothic, built from the 14th century on, and its south tower, finished in 1433, rises to 136 m. The roof is the part everyone remembers: 230,000 glazed tiles laid in zigzags, with the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs on the south side.

In April 1945, in the last days of the war, fire spread from the burning shops around the square, the roof collapsed and the great bell, the Pummerin, crashed down and shattered. Every Austrian province paid for part of the rebuilding, and the new Pummerin, cast in 1951 partly from the old one's metal, now hangs in the north tower. Climb the 343 steps of the south tower for the view, or take the lift up the north tower to see the bell and the roof up close. The catacombs below hold the urns with the entrails of Habsburg rulers, whose hearts lie in the Heart Crypt of the Augustinian Church at the Hofburg and whose bodies lie in the Imperial Crypt, both on today's walk. Behind the cathedral, at Domgasse 5, the Mozarthaus is the only one of Mozart's Vienna homes still standing; he wrote The Marriage of Figaro there.

Walk down the Graben, past the baroque Plague Column, and along Kohlmarkt, past the old court confectioner Demel, to the Hofburg, the palace the Habsburgs lived in every winter from the 13th century until 1918. It isn't one building but a town of them, added wing by wing over 600 years, and today it holds the president's office, a dozen museums and the Spanish Riding School.

The Imperial Apartments show how Franz Joseph lived: an iron camp bed, a desk where he worked from 5am, and almost no comfort for a man who ruled for 68 years. Next door, the Sisi Museum takes on his wife Elisabeth, the empress of the 1950s films with Romy Schneider. The real Sisi hated court life, spent years traveling to avoid Vienna, starved and exercised herself to a famous 50 cm waist, and was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist in Geneva in 1898. The museum is good at separating the woman from the legend.

Around the palace there's more than one day can hold. The Imperial Treasury has the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, about a thousand years old. The State Hall of the National Library is one of the most beautiful baroque libraries in the world. And at the Spanish Riding School, the white Lipizzaner horses, bred at Piber in Styria, train to music from Tuesday to Friday mornings, which costs a lot less than a full performance. On Sunday mornings from September to June, the Vienna Boys' Choir sings Mass at 9:15 in the Hofburg chapel. Outside, on Heldenplatz, a huge crowd cheered Hitler on 15 March 1938 as he announced Austria's annexation to the German Reich from the balcony of the Neue Burg.

A proper Wiener Schnitzel is veal, beaten thin, breaded and fried in lard or butter until the crumb puffs up in waves away from the meat. Austria's official food code says it has to be veal; the pork version is just as common and goes by Schnitzel Wiener Art, "Viennese-style", or vom Schwein. It comes with a wedge of lemon, potato salad or parsley potatoes and often Preiselbeeren, a tart lingonberry compote, and nothing else.

Figlmüller, in a passage off Wollzeile a few minutes from the cathedral, has served its plate-sized pork schnitzel since 1905 and is the famous one. It's touristy and it's fine. For the veal version and fewer queues, locals point you to traditional inns like Gasthaus Pöschl on Weihburggasse, or to the Schnitzelwirt in the 7th district for a huge, cheap one. Both are closed on Sundays.

Under the plain Capuchin church on Neuer Markt, the Imperial Crypt (Kaisergruft) has been the Habsburgs' burial place since 1633. About 150 members of the family lie here, and the coffins tell their own story: simple at first, then wildly baroque, with skulls, crowns and weeping figures, then simple again under Joseph II, who thought all of it a waste.

The centerpiece is the double sarcophagus of Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Stephan, sitting up in bed as if they've just woken. Franz Joseph lies between Sisi and their son Rudolf, who killed himself and his young lover at Mayerling in 1889. The burials haven't stopped: Otto von Habsburg, the last emperor's eldest son, was laid here in 2011, after the old ritual of knocking at the door three times and being let in only as "a mortal, sinful human being".

Ten minutes north, the quiet square of Judenplatz was the heart of medieval Jewish Vienna until 1421, when the community was expelled or murdered and its synagogue torn down. In the middle stands Rachel Whiteread's memorial to the roughly 65,000 Austrian Jews killed in the Holocaust, unveiled in 2000: a concrete cube cast as a library turned inside out, with rows of books whose spines you can't see and doors that don't open.

Before 1938 almost one in ten Viennese was Jewish, and the city's doctors, writers, composers and coffee-house regulars came disproportionately from that community. Museum Judenplatz, on the square, shows the excavated foundations of the medieval synagogue, and the main Jewish Museum is on Dorotheergasse, near the Hofburg. Both are closed on Saturdays.

The Viennese coffee house has been on Austria's UNESCO list of intangible heritage since 2011, and it's less about the coffee than about the time. You order a Melange (like a cappuccino, with milk foam) or an Einspänner (black coffee under whipped cream, in a glass), it comes on a small silver tray with a glass of water, and then nobody bothers you for as long as you like, with the newspapers on their wooden holders and the marble tables to yourself.

Café Hawelka on Dorotheergasse, run by the same family since 1939, is dark, smoky-looking and slightly shabby in the best way; it was the hangout of writers and artists after the war, and its Buchteln, jam-filled yeast buns, still come out of the oven every evening. Café Bräunerhof and Café Prückel are quieter. The most famous of all, Café Central in the Palais Ferstel, where Trotsky is said to have played chess, has been closed for renovation since March 2026 and is due to reopen in the winter; until then its pop-up, Café Decentral, is round the corner on Freyung.

The Vienna State Opera opened in 1869 with Don Giovanni, burned out in an American air raid in March 1945, and reopened ten years later with Beethoven's Fidelio, the opera about freedom from tyranny, in the year Austria got its independence back. It plays almost every night from September to June, with a different opera or ballet most nights and one of the best orchestras in the world in the pit.

The secret every Viennese student knows is standing room. A few hundred places at the back of the stalls and up in the galleries go for a small fraction of a seat, and the view from the parterre standing area is better than from many expensive boxes. Tie a scarf to the rail to keep your place in the interval, as the regulars do.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum was built in 1891 to show off what the Habsburgs had collected over five centuries, and the building is as grand as what's inside it: marble staircases, paintings by the young Klimt and his brother above the main stairs, and a café under the central dome that might be the most beautiful place to have cake in the city.

Go straight for the Bruegel room, with the largest collection of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's paintings anywhere: The Tower of Babel, Hunters in the Snow and The Peasant Wedding. Then Vermeer's The Art of Painting, Caravaggio, Rubens, Titian and Velázquez's portraits of Habsburg princesses. The Kunstkammer, the emperors' cabinet of curiosities, holds Cellini's gold salt cellar, which was stolen in 2003 and found buried in a forest three years later.

Across the square, its twin building is the Natural History Museum, home of the Venus of Willendorf, a 30,000-year-old limestone figure found in the Wachau, where you'll be on day four.

Cross the road into the MuseumsQuartier, the old imperial stables turned into a complex of museums, cafés and a big courtyard where students lounge on colored plastic loungers in summer. The white cube of the Leopold Museum holds the world's biggest collection of Egon Schiele, the painter who shocked Vienna with his twisted, naked self-portraits and died of the Spanish flu in 1918 at 28, three days after his pregnant wife.

The Leopold is the best place to understand Vienna 1900: Klimt's Death and Life, Kokoschka, furniture and glass by the Wiener Werkstätte, and the story of a few years when this city invented a good part of modern art, design and thought. Next door, mumok does contemporary art in a dark basalt block.

Walk ten minutes southeast to the Naschmarkt, Vienna's biggest market, a 1.5 km strip of stalls and small restaurants that has filled the space above the covered Wien river since the 19th century. It's the most international place to eat in the city: Austrian cheese and pickles next to Turkish, Israeli, Georgian and Japanese food, and plenty of stalls with seats where you can have lunch with a glass of wine.

It's also been half a building site. A new market hall of glass and wood, the Marktraum, has opened at the far end, near Kettenbrückengasse, with regional food, and the area around it is being rebuilt in stages. Locals find it overpriced these days and do their own shopping at the Brunnenmarkt in Ottakring or the Karmelitermarkt in Leopoldstadt, but for lunch among the stalls it's still the place. Before you leave, look across the road at Linke Wienzeile 38 and 40, two apartment blocks by Otto Wagner from 1899, one covered in gold medallions and the other, the Majolikahaus, in painted tiles of red roses.

At the city end of the market stands the Secession, a white temple with a dome of thousands of gilded laurel leaves that the Viennese call the golden cabbage. A group of young artists led by Klimt broke away from the official art establishment in 1897 and built this as their exhibition hall, with their motto over the door: "To every age its art, to art its freedom."

In the basement is Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, painted for a 1902 exhibition about the composer and meant to be thrown away afterwards. Three walls of gold, monsters and naked figures follow humanity's longing for happiness, through the hostile powers of disease, madness and lust, to the choir of angels and a final embrace inspired by the Ninth Symphony. It's Klimt at his strangest and best.

Across Karlsplatz, the Karlskirche is the city's great baroque church, promised by Emperor Charles VI during the plague of 1713 and finished in 1737 to a design by Fischer von Erlach. The two giant columns in front, wrapped in spiraling reliefs like Trajan's Column in Rome, are its signature. Inside, look up at the dome frescoes and visit the restored imperial oratory, with its view down into the church.

Next door, the Wien Museum reopened in 2023 after a big rebuild, and its permanent exhibition on the city's history is free: Roman Vindobona, the 1683 Ottoman siege, Biedermeier living rooms, Klimt's portrait of Emilie Flöge and a model of the city before the walls came down. Go up to the roof terrace for the view over Karlsplatz. Back in the square, the two little green and gold pavilions are Otto Wagner's metro stations from 1899.

Walk back towards the opera for dinner Vienna-style: standing up at a Würstelstand, a sausage stand. These kiosks are a city institution, open late, and the place where bankers, builders and opera-goers in evening dress queue side by side. Order a Käsekrainer, a smoked sausage with little pockets of cheese that melt when it's grilled, which locals call an Eitrige in Viennese slang, with mustard, a slice of bread and a can of beer.

Bitzinger, the stand next to the Albertina museum, is the best known, with a view of the opera house. The Albertina itself, up the steps behind it, has one of the world's great collections of drawings, including Dürer's Young Hare, so fragile that the original is shown only every few years, a facsimile the rest of the time, and a permanent show of Monet to Picasso.

The Golden Hall of the Musikverein, opened in 1870, is where the Vienna Philharmonic plays and where its New Year's Concert is broadcast to the world every 1 January. Its shoebox shape, wooden floor and gilded caryatids give it a warm, clear sound that acousticians rank among the best of any hall anywhere. On most evenings of the season there's something on, from the Philharmonic and visiting orchestras to chamber music in the smaller halls.

Book through the Musikverein's own website, or the Konzerthaus, the city's other great hall, a few minutes away. Ignore the men in Mozart costumes selling concert tickets around St. Stephen's: those are tourist shows with small ensembles, at prices that would buy you a seat at the real thing.

The Belvedere was the summer palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the general who drove the Ottomans out of Hungary after the siege of 1683, and he built it to look like he was richer than the emperor: two baroque palaces facing each other across a terraced garden of fountains and sphinxes. Today it's Austria's national gallery.

The Upper Belvedere holds the world's largest collection of Klimt paintings, and the reason most people come: The Kiss, from 1908, covered in real gold leaf. It's bigger than you expect and better than any print. A short walk south, at the Arsenal, the Military History Museum keeps the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo in 1914, and his bloodstained uniform. Don't stop there, though. Schiele's The Embrace, Kokoschka, the Biedermeier painters and Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps are all here too. And it was in the palace's Marble Hall, on 15 May 1955, that Austria signed the State Treaty that ended the occupation, before the foreign minister showed it to the crowd from the balcony.

Walk back through the Stadtpark, past the gilded statue of Johann Strauss II with his violin, one of the most photographed monuments in Vienna, to Wollzeile and Plachutta, the restaurant that made its name on Tafelspitz. It's boiled beef, which sounds bleak and isn't: a cut of the rump simmered for hours with root vegetables until it's tender enough to cut with a fork. It was said to be Franz Joseph's favorite meal.

At Plachutta it arrives in the copper pot it was cooked in, and the ritual matters. First you drink the broth, with noodles or semolina dumplings. Then you spread the marrow from the bone on dark toast, and finally the beef, with apple horseradish, chive sauce, creamed spinach and fried potatoes. Book a day ahead, as locals do.

Fifteen minutes east, on the corner of Kegelgasse and Löwengasse, the Hundertwasser House looks like a child drew it: wavy floors, onion domes, uneven windows, patches of red, blue and yellow, and trees growing out of the flats. The artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who hated straight lines, designed it as city council housing with the architect Josef Krawina, and it was finished in 1985.

People still live in it, so you can't go in. Across the street, the Hundertwasser Village is a shopping arcade in the same style, and a five-minute walk away, the Kunst Haus Wien shows his paintings in another building he redesigned, with a café whose floor rises and falls under your feet.

Take the tram or walk 20 minutes north across the Danube Canal to the Prater, the imperial hunting ground that Joseph II opened to everyone in 1766. Its front end is the Wurstelprater, a funfair of rollercoasters and ghost trains, and over it turns the Riesenrad, the Giant Ferris Wheel, built in 1897 for Franz Joseph's golden jubilee.

It burned in the last days of the war and came back with half of its original 30 cabins, the red wooden ones that still turn today, slowly enough for a 15-minute ride to feel calm. This is where Harry Lime gives his speech about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man, the 1949 film set in occupied Vienna. Beyond the funfair, the Hauptallee runs straight for 4 km under chestnut trees through the green Prater, where Vienna goes running.

At the edge of the Prater, the Schweizerhaus is a vast beer garden under chestnut trees that has been run by the same family since 1920. It's famous for two things: Stelze, a whole roasted pork knuckle with crackling, served with mustard, horseradish and bread, and Czech Budweiser Budvar, poured into half-liter mugs.

It's loud, cheerful and full of locals, and one knuckle is enough for two. Order a Krügel, a half-liter mug, and enjoy the most Viennese of evenings that has nothing to do with opera.

Walk back towards the center along the Danube Canal, the arm of the river that separates the old city from Leopoldstadt. Its walls are covered in legal graffiti, and in the warmer months its banks fill with bars in deckchairs, from Strandbar Herrmann to NENI am Wasser, where Vienna's young crowd starts the night.

Out of season, the bars move indoors. Head up into the old center to the Loos American Bar on Kärntner Durchgang, a tiny jewel box of onyx and mirrors designed by Adolf Loos in 1908, for a cocktail in what may be the smallest famous bar in Europe.

Melk Abbey sits on a rock above the river like a golden ocean liner. Benedictine monks have lived here since 1089, and they still run a school in it, but the building you see is a baroque rebuild of 1702-1736 by Jakob Prandtauer, meant to show the glory of God and of the abbey in about equal measure.

The tour takes you through the imperial rooms, the Marble Hall and out on to a terrace with the river below, then into the library, two stories of leather-bound books under a ceiling fresco, the room Umberto Eco had in mind when he named the narrator of The Name of the Rose Adso of Melk. It ends in the church, an explosion of gold, marble and painted sky.

The best way to see the Wachau is from the river. Boats leave the landing below Melk Abbey and drift downstream past Schönbühel castle on its rock, Aggstein ruin high on the right bank, and the wine villages of Spitz and Weissenkirchen with their church towers among the vines. Sit on the open deck if the weather allows.

The hills are terraced with dry-stone walls for vineyards, and the slopes facing south are some of the most prized white-wine sites in Europe. In spring the valley is white with apricot blossom; in October it turns gold during the harvest.

Dürnstein is the prettiest town in the valley: one main street, the blue and white baroque tower of its abbey on the riverbank, and the ruin of Kuenringer castle on the rock above. In December 1192, on his way home from the Third Crusade, King Richard the Lionheart of England was arrested near Vienna by Duke Leopold V of Austria, whom he had insulted in the Holy Land, and was held here before being handed to the emperor. England paid a ransom of 150,000 marks to get him back, and Austria's share paid for new walls around Vienna.

The story of the minstrel Blondel finding his king by singing under the castle windows is a later legend, but the walk up to the ruin is real and takes about 20 minutes, for a view down the river. Back in town, buy something made of Wachau apricots: jam, schnapps or Marillenknödel, apricot dumplings rolled in buttered breadcrumbs, in season in summer.

Take bus 715 or a taxi the last 7 km to Krems, a small, lively wine town at the end of the valley, with the old Steiner Tor gate and streets of Renaissance houses. This is the place for a glass or two before the train: the Wachau's whites are Grüner Veltliner, peppery and fresh, and Riesling, and the wineries grade them by ripeness as Steinfeder, Federspiel and the richest, Smaragd, named after an emerald lizard that suns itself on the terrace walls.

The Domäne Wachau cooperative in Dürnstein and the wine bars and Heurigen around Krems are the easy places to try them. Trains back to Vienna leave about every hour.

Schönbrunn was the Habsburgs' summer residence, and the palace Fischer von Erlach began for Leopold I in 1696 was remodeled for Maria Theresa from the 1740s into the yellow palace you see, with 1,441 rooms. Her children grew up here, and in 1762 a six-year-old Mozart played for her in the Hall of Mirrors and, the story goes, jumped into her lap and kissed her. Franz Joseph was born at Schönbrunn in 1830 and died here in 1916, in the middle of the war that would end his empire.

Two years later, on 11 November 1918, his successor Karl I signed his withdrawal from government in the palace, and 640 years of Habsburg rule ended. The State Apartments ticket covers a short selection of rooms, and the full Palace Ticket the whole state floor, including Maria Theresa's private rooms and the Millions Room, paneled in rosewood and Indo-Persian miniatures. In 1961, during their summit in Vienna, Kennedy and Khrushchev dined together in the Great Gallery.

Behind the palace, the baroque gardens run uphill in straight lines of clipped trees, fountains and fake Roman ruins to the Gloriette, a colonnade on the hilltop from 1775 that was built purely as a viewpoint. Walk up for the view of the palace with the whole city behind it, and stop at the café inside if the day is nice.

In the grounds are the maze, the Palm House and the Tiergarten, the oldest zoo in the world still running, founded in 1752, now with a pair of giant pandas.

The dough for a proper Apfelstrudel is stretched by hand over a tablecloth until it's so thin you could read a newspaper through it, then rolled around sliced apples, raisins, cinnamon and buttered breadcrumbs. It's often said to have come by way of Hungary from Ottoman baklava, which nobody can prove, but the oldest strudel recipe in Vienna's city library dates from 1696.

Gerstner, the old court confectioner, runs the café in the palace's Kavalierstrakt, and its strudel show, a few times a day, has a baker stretching the dough in front of you before you get a slice, warm, with whipped cream or vanilla sauce. It's touristy and it's fun, and the strudel is good.

Take the U4 to its last stop, Heiligenstadt, and the building in front of you, a kilometer long, is the Karl-Marx-Hof, the most famous building of Red Vienna. Between 1919 and 1934 the Social Democrat city government built more than 60,000 council flats, with laundries, kindergartens, libraries and courtyard gardens, and this one, finished in 1930, is its showpiece. It was paid for mostly by a steeply progressive housing tax, with extra taxes on luxuries.

In February 1934, during Austria's short civil war, the workers in it held out against the army, which shelled the building. Red Vienna was crushed that day, but its idea survived: the city still owns around 220,000 flats, and about a quarter of Viennese live in them. The small Waschsalon museum in one of the old laundries tells the story.

Beethoven moved house in Vienna more than 60 times, and spent many summers in Heiligenstadt, then a village among the vineyards. In 1802, in a house on Probusgasse, he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers about his growing deafness and how close it had brought him to suicide, which was found among his papers after he died. The house is now the Beethoven Museum, the best of the Beethoven houses in town. It closes for lunch from 1pm to 2pm and on Mondays.

Afterwards, walk the Eroicagasse and the Beethovengang, the path by a stream where, according to his secretary, he found the birdsong for the Pastoral Symphony.

Bus 38A climbs from Heiligenstadt up through the vineyards and the edge of the Vienna Woods to the Kahlenberg, 484 m up, for the best view of the city: the Danube and its bridges, the towers of the UN City, St. Stephen's in the middle and the plain stretching off to Hungary.

This is where, on 12 September 1683, the relief army under the Polish king Jan III Sobieski came down out of the woods to break the two-month Ottoman siege of Vienna, in what's often called the largest cavalry charge in history. The little church on the summit has a Polish chapel to commemorate it.

Vienna has about 600 hectares of vineyards inside the city limits, and its own way of drinking them. A Heuriger is a wine tavern run by the winemaker, a custom made official by Joseph II in 1784, when he allowed growers to sell their own wine and food without a license. When one is open, it hangs a bunch of pine twigs over the door. You sit at long wooden tables, order wine by the quarter liter and pick your food from a cold and hot buffet: roast pork, blood sausage, Liptauer cheese spread and bread.

Drink Wiener Gemischter Satz, the local white made from several grape varieties grown together in one vineyard. Mayer am Pfarrplatz, in Heiligenstadt, is in a house where Beethoven lived in 1817. Grinzing is the famous Heuriger village, and the big places there fill with tour buses; for a more local evening, try Nussdorf or Stammersdorf, across the river. On some evenings a pair of musicians plays Schrammelmusik, old Viennese songs on violin and guitar. That's the way to end five days in Vienna.