The Most Beautiful Places in Austria
34 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Austria are Hallstatt, Grossglockner High Alpine Road and Melk Abbey. The list covers 34 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Austria combines two very different kinds of grandeur. The Alps cover most of the country, and their limestone ranges are riddled with caves, cut by gorges and fed by meltwater that plunges into deep valleys. At the other end lies Vienna, for centuries the seat of the Habsburgs, whose court, church and aristocracy turned the city into one of the great showcases of Baroque architecture, and later into a capital of music and of the Secession.
Schönbrunn Palace, the Habsburg summer residence, sets its yellow facade against formal gardens that climb to the Gloriette. The Belvedere, built for Prince Eugene of Savoy, now holds Klimt's The Kiss. Karlskirche, vowed by Charles VI during a plague, frames its dome with two columns modelled on Trajan's, and St Stephen's Cathedral wears a steep roof of glazed tiles laid in zigzag patterns. The Central Cemetery holds the graves of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, and the Prater keeps its giant Ferris wheel of 1897.
Outside the capital the scale changes. Hallstatt clings to its lake beneath a mountain where salt has been mined since prehistory. Eisriesenwelt near Werfen is the largest ice cave known, and the Krimml Waterfalls drop about 380 metres in three tiers. The Semmering railway, opened in 1854, threads viaducts and tunnels across the mountains, and the Erzberg in Styria is an iron-ore mountain cut into giant red terraces by centuries of mining. Riegersburg Castle sits on a volcanic rock high above the Styrian hills.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hallstatt | Most beautiful village | |
| 2 | Grossglockner High Alpine Road | Mountain pass | |
| 3 | Melk Abbey | Abbey | |
| 4 | Vorderer Gosausee | Lake | |
| 5 | Admont Abbey | Library building | |
| 6 | Krimml Waterfalls | Waterfall | |
| 7 | Hochosterwitz Castle | Castle | |
| 8 | Belvedere, Vienna | Palace | |
| 9 | Schönbrunn Palace | Palace | ✓ |
| 10 | Karlskirche | Church building | |
| 11 | St. Stephen's Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 12 | Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg) | Mine | |
| 13 | Vienna Central Cemetery | Cemetery | |
| 14 | Semmering railway | Heritage railway | |
| 15 | Wurstelprater | Amusement park | |
| 16 | Eisriesenwelt | Ice cave | |
| 17 | Riegersburg Castle | Castle | |
| 18 | Secession Building | Museum | |
| 19 | Kunsthaus Graz | Museum | |
| 20 | Bad Gastein | Spa town | |
| 21 | Hundertwasserhaus | Monument | |
| 22 | Vienna State Opera | Opera house | |
| 23 | Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car | Aerial tramway | |
| 24 | Hohensalzburg Fortress | Fortress | |
| 25 | Musikverein | Theatre building | |
| 26 | Liechtensteinklamm | Canyon | |
| 27 | Kirche am Steinhof | Church building | |
| 28 | Pyramidenkogel Tower | Observation tower | |
| 29 | Getreidegasse, Salzburg | Pedestrian street | |
| 30 | Kunsthistorisches Museum | Museum |
01 Hallstatt
Austria47.556° N 13.647° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 Hallstatt occupies a strip of land that barely exists.
Did you know? Iron Age miners hacked heart-shaped grooves into the rock to prise out slabs of salt; two surviving slabs weigh 12 and 42 kilograms.
02 Grossglockner High Alpine Road
Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße
Austria47.083° N 12.842° E
Image by SL10 from Pixabay The Grossglockner High Alpine Road was built to show off the mountains, and it still does it better than almost any road in the Alps.
Did you know? Snow clearing in 1936-37 took 350 men about seventy days to shovel 250,000 cubic metres of snow by hand.
03 Melk Abbey
Benediktinerstift Melk
Austria48.228° N 15.331° E
Image by ArmbrustAnna from Pixabay Seen from the Danube, Melk Abbey looks less like a monastery than a palace laid along a rock above the river, with twin towers and a great dome at its western end.
Did you know? In the late 18th century the abbey was a centre of Enlightenment thought, and some of its monks belonged to a Masonic lodge.
04 Vorderer Gosausee
Austria47.529° N 13.505° E
Dimitry Anikin · CC0 Vorderer Gosausee, the lower of the Gosau lakes in the Salzkammergut of Upper Austria, owes its fame to a single view.
Did you know? The lake covers about 52 hectares and is only around 500 metres across at its widest.
05 Admont Abbey
Stift Admont
Austria47.575° N 14.462° E
Image by brandldesign from Pixabay Admont Abbey, in the Enns valley of Styria at the gateway to the Gesäuse mountains, is the oldest surviving monastery in the province, founded in 1074 by Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg, and a Benedictine community still lives here.
Did you know? The shelves follow a plan: theology in the northern half, the secular sciences in the southern half, and Bibles and Church Fathers beneath the central dome.
06 Krimml Waterfalls
Krimmler Wasserfälle
Austria47.198° N 12.171° E
Image by 2780243 from Pixabay In the Hohe Tauern mountains of the Austrian state of Salzburg, the Krimmler Ache leaves its high glacial valley by throwing itself over a rock wall in three great leaps. Together they drop about 380 metres, which makes the Krimml Waterfalls the highest in Austria.
Did you know? About 12 percent of the river's 110 square kilometre catchment is covered by glaciers, which is why its flow swings so sharply through the day and the year.
07 Hochosterwitz Castle
Burg Hochosterwitz
Austria · 18.1 km from Klagenfurt46.756° N 14.452° E
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay Hochosterwitz stands on an isolated dolomite rock that rises about 170 metres above the Zollfeld plain in Carinthia, about 7 km east of St. Veit an der Glan; on a clear day it can be seen from some 30 km away.
Did you know? Inside the Wächtertor a stair leads out to a rock ledge from which defenders could hurl stone blocks onto anyone below.
08 Belvedere, Vienna
Schloss Belvedere
Austria · 1.5 km from Vienna48.193° N 16.381° E
Image by lapping from Pixabay The Belvedere is Vienna's great Baroque ensemble: two palaces facing each other across a garden that climbs a gentle slope, built as a summer residence for Prince Eugene of Savoy. His architect was Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt.
Did you know? Bernardo Bellotto's 1758 painting of Vienna seen from the Upper Belvedere gave its name to the Canaletto view, still cited in debates about the city's skyline.
09 Schönbrunn Palace
Schloss Schönbrunn
Austria · 4.3 km from Vienna48.185° N 16.312° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Sekau67 from Pixabay Schönbrunn was the summer residence of the Habsburgs, and it grew from a hunting ground.
Did you know? The Roman Ruin was built from scratch in 1778 as a deliberately crumbling folly and was originally called the Ruin of Carthage.
10 Karlskirche
Wiener Karlskirche
Austria · 0.7 km from Vienna48.198° N 16.372° E
Image by domeckopol from Pixabay Vienna's most theatrical church was born of a vow. In 1713, a year after the city's last great plague, Emperor Charles VI promised a church to his namesake Saint Charles Borromeo, the Counter-Reformation archbishop venerated as a helper of plague victims.
Did you know? Golden letters beneath the pediment quote a Latin psalm verse about fulfilling vows, marking the Karlskirche as a votive church.
11 St. Stephen's Cathedral
Stephansdom
Austria · 1 km from Vienna48.208° N 16.373° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay St. Stephen's Cathedral is the centre of Vienna in every sense: the U-Bahn's central interchange lies beneath its square, and its south tower, known to the Viennese as the Steffl, dominates the old-town skyline at 136 metres.
Did you know? The Giant's Door may owe its name to a mammoth thighbone, dug up in 1443 during work on the north tower and hung above the portal for decades.
12 Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg)
Erzberg
Austria47.525° N 14.912° E
Image by MartinStr from Pixabay Above the old mining town of Eisenerz in Upper Styria, a whole mountain has been cut into a staircase. The Erzberg, the "ore mountain", rises in rust-red and ochre terraces that give it the silhouette of a stepped pyramid, and locals half-jokingly call it the Styrian loaf of bread.
Did you know? The local mining company welcomed the doubtful date and staged grand celebrations of the mine's thousandth anniversary in 1712.
13 Vienna Central Cemetery
Wiener Zentralfriedhof
Austria · 7.9 km from Vienna48.151° N 16.438° E
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay Vienna's Central Cemetery was planned for an empire that never arrived. In the 1860s the city fathers expected the capital of Austria-Hungary to reach four million people, and they set aside a vast flat tract in Simmering, far outside the town, big enough for generations of the dead.
Did you know? The first burial, that of Jakob Zelzer, took place on opening day, 1 November 1874, and fifteen more followed the same day.
14 Semmering railway
Semmeringbahn
Austria · 36.8 km from Wiener Neustadt47.643° N 15.831° E
Haeferl · CC BY-SA 3.0 at The Semmering railway climbs over an Alpine pass on a line laid out more than 170 years ago, curling along cliff ledges and crossing gorges on tiers of stone arches.
Did you know? Some 89 workers died in accidents, including 14 miners killed by a rockfall at the Weinzettelwand in 1850, and several hundred more died of cholera and other diseases.
15 Wurstelprater
Austria · 3.1 km from Vienna48.215° N 16.402° E
Image by rperucho from Pixabay The Wurstelprater is the amusement quarter at the western end of the Prater, Vienna's great public park in the second district. The Prater itself was a royal hunting ground until 1766, when Emperor Joseph II opened it to everyone and allowed showmen, coffee houses and inns to set up there.
Did you know? The Riesenrad was built to mark the golden jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and its builder Walter Bassett died almost bankrupt in 1907.
16 Eisriesenwelt
Austria · 36 km from Salzburg47.503° N 13.190° E
Image by dirgiS22 from Pixabay In 1879, a Salzburg naturalist named Anton von Posselt-Czorich became the first documented person to enter this cave above the Salzach valley.
Did you know? Von Mörk was killed in the First World War at the age of 27, and his urn rests above a passage inside the cave.
17 Riegersburg Castle
Riegersburg
Austria47.005° N 15.932° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 Riegersburg Castle crowns a sheer outcrop of basalt in the hills of southeastern Styria, the neck of an extinct volcano that rises abruptly above the surrounding farmland to about 482 metres above sea level.
Did you know? The Gallerin married three times: she paid her first husband 15,000 guilders to stay out of co-ownership, lost the second at the Battle of Mogersdorf and divorced the third.
18 Secession Building
Wiener Secessionsgebäude
Austria · 0.2 km from Vienna48.200° N 16.366° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 A white cube crowned by a dome of gilded wrought-iron laurel leaves, the Secession Building looks less like a gallery than a small temple, and that was the point.
Did you know? In 1945 the frieze was among the artworks recovered by the Allies from the Altaussee salt mine, where the Nazis had stored looted art.
19 Kunsthaus Graz
Austria · 2 km from Graz47.071° N 15.434° E
Marion Schneider & Christoph Aistleitner · CC BY-SA 2.5 In the middle of Graz's red-tiled old suburbs sits a bulging, blue-black bubble with nozzle-like skylights sprouting from its roof. Locals nicknamed the Kunsthaus the "Friendly Alien", and the name stuck: few buildings make their contrast with their surroundings so deliberately, or so good-naturedly.
Did you know? The Kunsthaus has no storage depot at all, since it neither collects art nor keeps a permanent exhibition.
20 Bad Gastein
Austria47.115° N 13.136° E
Image by Separatus from Pixabay Bad Gastein is a spa town that looks like a small city clinging to a cliff. It sits at about 1,000 m in the Gastein Valley of the Hohe Tauern, and its centre was built around a waterfall: the Gasteiner Ache drops about 340 m in three steps straight through the middle of town, spanned by a stone bridge of 1840.
Did you know? Franz Schubert stayed here in August 1825, a visit associated with his Great C major Symphony.
21 Hundertwasserhaus
Austria · 2.3 km from Vienna48.208° N 16.394° E
Image by sasenocka from Pixabay In a street of sober Viennese apartment blocks, one building refuses every straight line.
Did you know? The architect's first drafts of 1979 followed the standard rules for social housing, and Hundertwasser rejected them as exactly the rigid grid he had always fought against.
22 Vienna State Opera
Wiener Staatsoper
Austria · 0.4 km from Vienna48.203° N 16.369° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The Vienna State Opera was the first great public building of the Ringstrasse, the boulevard laid out on the line of the old city walls, and it set the tone for everything that followed: a Neo-Renaissance palace of music built entirely of dressed stone.
Did you know? Until the First Austrian Republic was established, it was the Vienna Court Opera; it took its present name in 1921.
23 Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car
Tiroler Zugspitzbahn
Austria · 35.8 km from Innsbruck47.421° N 10.984° E
Image by 4589191 from Pixabay The Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany, rises on the border with Austria, and from the Tyrolean side a cable car climbs straight up its western face. 6 kilometres to the summit station at about 2,950 metres, in a single sweep of about seven minutes.
Did you know? From the old top station, skiers walked through a tunnel about 700 metres long to reach the glacier plateau of the Zugspitzplatt.
24 Hohensalzburg Fortress
Festung Hohensalzburg
Austria · 1.8 km from Salzburg47.795° N 13.047° E
Image by PaulAzorcan from Pixabay Hohensalzburg Fortress covers the whole top of the Festungsberg, 506 metres above sea level, and at about 250 by 150 metres it is one of the largest medieval castles in Europe.
Did you know? The fortress's only siege, in 1525, lasted from 5 July to 31 August, and the rebel peasants and miners never broke in.
25 Musikverein
Wiener Musikverein
Austria · 0.6 km from Vienna48.200° N 16.373° E
Image by geischlaeger0 from Pixabay Few rooms on earth are as closely tied to the sound of an orchestra as the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. Richly gilded, it is known simply as the Golden Hall, and since the building opened in 1870 it has been the home stage of the Vienna Philharmonic.
Did you know? Before 1870 the Society of Friends of Music, founded in 1812, gave concerts in a hall on Tuchlauben that seated only about 700.
26 Liechtensteinklamm
Austria47.311° N 13.191° E
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay The Liechtensteinklamm is one of the deepest and narrowest gorges in the Alps: a cleft up to 300 metres deep that the mountain stream Großarler Ache has cut through the rock on its way out of the Großarl valley.
Did you know? The gorge has always blocked traffic into the Großarl valley, so the road has had to climb around it on the slopes to the east.
27 Kirche am Steinhof
Austria · 6.5 km from Vienna48.211° N 16.279° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a hilltop above the western edge of Vienna, a white marble church with a copper-and-gold dome crowns the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. The Kirche am Steinhof, dedicated to St. Leopold, is Otto Wagner's masterpiece and one of the most important Art Nouveau churches anywhere.
Did you know? The dome cannot be seen from inside: a lower ceiling hides it, yet the nave still has a reverberation of about six seconds.
28 Pyramidenkogel Tower
Aussichtsturm Pyramidenkogel
Austria · 12.7 km from Klagenfurt46.609° N 14.145° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Pyramidenkogel is an 851-metre wooded summit on the south side of the Wörthersee in Carinthia, and the tower on top of it is the reason people drive up.
Did you know? Its concrete predecessor, designed by Gustav Wetzlinger, was nicknamed the "Schwammerl", or little mushroom, for its umbrella-like platforms on a slender stem.
29 Getreidegasse, Salzburg
Getreidegasse
Austria · 1.2 km from Salzburg47.800° N 13.043° E
Image by alsen from Pixabay Getreidegasse is Salzburg's oldest trading street and one of the most atmospheric shopping lanes in the Alps. It runs through the Old Town beneath the cliffs of the Mönchsberg, lined with tall, narrow townhouses standing shoulder to shoulder.
Did you know? The future German Social Democrat leader August Bebel served part of his apprenticeship as a turner at No. 3 in 1859–1860.
30 Kunsthistorisches Museum
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien
Austria · 0.3 km from Vienna48.204° N 16.362° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The Kunsthistorisches Museum exists because the Habsburgs wanted their collections seen. Emperor Franz Joseph commissioned it and its twin, the Natural History Museum, facing each other across Maria-Theresien-Platz on the Ringstrasse.
Did you know? The man who stole the salt cellar turned out to be a specialist in security alarms; he gave himself up after police published surveillance images.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Austria?
- On our list, Hallstatt ranks first, followed by Grossglockner High Alpine Road and Melk Abbey.
- Where can you see Klimt's The Kiss?
- The Kiss hangs in the Upper Belvedere in Vienna, the palace built for Prince Eugene of Savoy, which holds the largest collection of Klimt's paintings.
- What is the largest ice cave in the world?
- Eisriesenwelt in the Tennengebirge above Werfen is the largest known ice cave, with passages stretching for more than 40 kilometres. Only the first kilometre or so near the entrance is coated in ice; the rest of the system is bare limestone.
- Why is Hallstatt famous?
- Salt has been mined in the mountain above Hallstatt since prehistoric times, and finds from its ancient cemetery gave their name to the Hallstatt culture of the early Iron Age. The village and its lake are part of the Hallstatt-Dachstein Salzkammergut World Heritage Site.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Austria?
- In our collection, the places in Austria are most often museums (4), churches (3), lakes (2) and castles (2).
- How many places are on this list in Austria?
- The list covers 34 places.