The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Austria
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sacred places in Austria are Karlskirche, St. Stephen's Cathedral and Vienna Central Cemetery. The list covers 5 sacred places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Austria's sacred architecture tells the story of a Catholic empire. Gothic masons left Vienna its great cathedral, the Counter-Reformation and the Habsburgs filled the country with Baroque abbeys and churches, and around 1900 Viennese architects created a modern religious art of their own. Even its cemeteries are monuments, gathering the graves of composers whose music the whole world knows.
Karlskirche, vowed by Emperor Charles VI during the plague of 1713 and designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, combines a great dome with two columns modelled on Trajan's Column. St. Stephen's Cathedral rises over Vienna with its tall Gothic south tower and roof of glazed tiles laid in a zigzag pattern. Vienna Central Cemetery holds the graves of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Johann Strauss II. Melk Abbey, rebuilt by Jakob Prandtauer in the early 18th century, stands on a rock above the Danube with a golden Baroque church and library. Kirche am Steinhof, by Otto Wagner, is a white marble-clad church with a gilded dome, a masterpiece of Viennese Art Nouveau.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Karlskirche | Church building | |
| 2 | St. Stephen's Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 3 | Vienna Central Cemetery | Cemetery | |
| 4 | Melk Abbey | Abbey | |
| 5 | Kirche am Steinhof | Church building |
01 Karlskirche
Wiener Karlskirche
Austria · 0.7 km from Vienna48.198° N 16.372° E
Image by domeckopol from Pixabay What makes the Karlskirche unforgettable is the way it stitches together architectural quotations that should not fit.
Did you know? The two great spiral-relief columns are hollow inside, built of Zogelsdorf limestone from Lower Austria.
02 St. Stephen's Cathedral
Stephansdom
Austria · 1 km from Vienna48.208° N 16.373° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The south tower took 65 years to build, from 1368 to 1433, and served as the city's observation post during the Ottoman sieges of 1529 and 1683. Its northern twin was abandoned in 1511 at 68 metres and capped in 1578 with a Renaissance top. It now holds the Pummerin, a bell of 20,130 kilograms, the largest in Austria.
Did you know? Until 1955 watchmen lived in a small apartment high in the south tower, keeping lookout through the night and ringing the bells if they spotted a fire.
03 Vienna Central Cemetery
Wiener Zentralfriedhof
Austria · 7.9 km from Vienna48.151° N 16.438° E
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay Distance made the new cemetery unpopular, so the city gave people a reason to come: honorary graves. Beethoven and Schubert were moved here in 1888, and Brahms, Johann Strauss II and Arnold Schoenberg lie in the same section, with a memorial to Mozart, who is buried in the nearby St Marx Cemetery. The architecture came next.
Did you know? The winning design competition entry bore the Latin motto 'per angusta ad augusta', meaning through hardship to greatness.
04 Melk Abbey
Benediktinerstift Melk
Austria48.228° N 15.331° E
Image by ArmbrustAnna from Pixabay The building that stands today was begun in 1702 by abbot Berthold Dietmayr and his architect Jakob Prandtauer, who ran the works until his death in 1726; his nephew Joseph Munggenast finished them. It is the largest monastic complex of the Austrian Baroque, with a main axis some 320 metres long.
Did you know? The abbey school was confiscated under Nazi rule; it was returned after the war and now teaches nearly 900 boys and girls.
05 Kirche am Steinhof
Austria · 6.5 km from Vienna48.211° N 16.279° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 Wagner treated the building as a piece of modern engineering as much as a sanctuary. The facade is clad in some 3,000 thin plates of Carrara marble, and the dome is copper with gilded decoration.
Did you know? Among the saints in the altar mosaic is Dymphna, patron of people with mental illness, chosen for a congregation of psychiatric patients.
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 sacred places in Austria?
- On our list, Karlskirche ranks first, followed by St. Stephen's Cathedral and Vienna Central Cemetery.
- How tall is the south tower of St. Stephen's Cathedral?
- The south tower, completed in the 15th century, is about 136 metres high and is the city's most recognisable landmark.
- Why was the Karlskirche built?
- Emperor Charles VI vowed to build it during the plague epidemic of 1713 and dedicated it to St. Charles Borromeo, a patron saint invoked against plague.
- Who designed the Kirche am Steinhof?
- Otto Wagner designed it in 1904–1907 for the Steinhof psychiatric hospital, with mosaics and stained glass by Koloman Moser.
- How many sacred places are on this list in Austria?
- The list covers 5 sacred places.