The Most Beautiful Places in Vienna
13 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Vienna are Schönbrunn Palace, Karlskirche and St. Stephen's Cathedral. The list covers 13 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Vienna was the capital of the Habsburgs for more than six centuries, and its beauty is the beauty of an imperial city that kept reinventing itself. Baroque palaces and churches went up after the Ottoman siege of 1683 was lifted, the Ringstrasse replaced the old walls with a parade of public buildings in the 19th century, and around 1900 Klimt, Otto Wagner and the Secession artists made the city a cradle of modern design. Music runs through all of it, from Mozart and Beethoven to the Strauss waltzes.
The imperial layer is grand. Schönbrunn, the Habsburg summer residence, faces formal gardens that rise to the Gloriette, and the Belvedere, built for Prince Eugene of Savoy, now holds Klimt's The Kiss. The Karlskirche, built after a plague vow, flanks its dome with two columns modelled on Trajan's in Rome, and the patterned tile roof of St. Stephen's Cathedral rises over the old centre. In the Hofburg, the State Hall of the Austrian National Library is a baroque hall of books under a painted dome.
Music and modernity complete it. The State Opera and the golden hall of the Musikverein are among the most famous stages in the world, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum holds a celebrated collection of Bruegel. The Secession Building wears a dome of gilded laurel leaves, Otto Wagner's Kirche am Steinhof gleams in white marble and gold on a hill, and the Hundertwasserhaus breaks every straight line. In the Prater, the Giant Ferris Wheel has turned since 1897.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Schönbrunn Palace | Palace | ✓ |
| 2 | Karlskirche | Church building | |
| 3 | St. Stephen's Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 4 | Wurstelprater | Amusement park | |
| 5 | Belvedere, Vienna | Palace | |
| 6 | Secession Building | Museum | |
| 7 | Hundertwasserhaus | Monument | |
| 8 | Vienna State Opera | Opera house | |
| 9 | Musikverein | Theatre building | |
| 10 | Kirche am Steinhof | Church building | |
| 11 | Kunsthistorisches Museum | Museum | |
| 12 | Heeresgeschichtliches Museum | Museum | |
| 13 | State Hall of the Austrian National Library | Library building |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 Heeresgeschichtliches Museum
Austria · 2.5 km from Vienna48.185° N 16.387° E
Carl Haack · Public domain Rising from the brick barracks and workshops of Vienna's Arsenal, the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum looks less like a military museum than a Byzantine palace: a long façade of striped red and yellow brick, terracotta ornament and crenellated corner towers, gathered around a central block crowned by a dome.
Did you know? The car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 is displayed here with his bloodstained uniform.
13 State Hall of the Austrian National Library
Prunksaal der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek
Austria · 0.5 km from Vienna48.206° N 16.367° E
Richard Hopkins · CC BY 2.0 The State Hall, or Prunksaal, is the ceremonial heart of the old imperial court library in Vienna's Hofburg, and one of the grandest library interiors ever built.
Did you know? The hall measures 77.7 by 14.2 metres, while its oval dome, about 18 by 29 metres in plan, climbs to roughly 29 metres above the floor.
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 Vienna?
- On our list, Schönbrunn Palace ranks first, followed by Karlskirche and St. Stephen's Cathedral.
- Where can you see Klimt's The Kiss?
- The Kiss hangs in the Upper Belvedere in Vienna, which holds the world's largest collection of Gustav Klimt's paintings. It was painted in 1907–1908 at the height of his golden period.
- What is the Secession Building?
- It is an exhibition hall built in 1897–1898 by Joseph Maria Olbrich for the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who broke away from the academic establishment. Its basement holds Klimt's Beethoven Frieze.
- Where is the Vienna New Year's Concert held?
- The Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert takes place in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, famous for its acoustics. The programme is built around waltzes and polkas by the Strauss family.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Vienna?
- In our collection, the places in Vienna are most often churches (3), museums (3), palaces (2) and theatres (2).
- How many places are on this list in Vienna?
- The list covers 13 places.