Schönbrunn Palace is Vienna's one unmissable full day out — book timed entry online ahead, especially for the Grand Tour of the Imperial Apartments, and go early to get ahead of the tour-bus crowds that build through late morning. The Hofburg complex in the centre is denser and can be done in half a day: the Sisi Museum and Imperial Apartments, the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer (Imperial Treasury, arguably the single best collection in the city), and the Spanish Riding School if the Lipizzaner training schedule lines up with your dates.
The Ringstrasse, the grand boulevard that replaced the old city walls, strings together the State Opera, the Parliament, the Rathaus (City Hall) and the twin Kunsthistorisches/Naturhistorisches museums facing each other across Maria-Theresien-Platz — walkable in a morning, or ride the vintage tram loop for the same view sitting down. Vienna's coffeehouse culture is UNESCO-listed intangible heritage, not a tourist gimmick: a Melange and a newspaper at Café Central or one of its rivals is the correct way to spend a slow afternoon, and no one will rush you out.
Best time to visit: May–June and September avoid both winter's short days and the August heat, when many Viennese themselves leave town and some smaller venues reduce hours. December brings the Christmas markets, genuinely worth planning around if the dates align. The city is compact and the U-Bahn is fast and simple — a multi-day transport ticket beats individual fares if you're staying more than two days.
Don't Miss
Highest-rated in Vienna
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien
Vienna's great art history museum — one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings on earth, housed in a palatial 19th-century building built to hold it.
Belvedere (Upper Belvedere)
Prince Eugene's Baroque summer palace, now home to Gustav Klimt's The Kiss and the world's largest Klimt collection, with gardens sweeping down toward the Vienna skyline.
Schönbrunn Palace
The Habsburgs' vast Baroque summer palace — 1,441 rooms, gardens stretching to the Gloriette hilltop monument, and the residence where Maria Theresa raised 16 children and ran an empire.
Musikverein
Home of the Vienna Philharmonic and the world-famous New Year's Concert — a Golden Hall ranked among the best-sounding concert halls anywhere.
Austrian National Library — Prunksaal (State Hall)
One of the most beautiful libraries in the world — an 80-metre Baroque hall of gilded shelving, marble statues and a ceiling fresco, built to hold 200,000 historic volumes.
Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
Vienna's Natural History Museum — dinosaur skeletons, meteorites and the 29,500-year-old Venus of Willendorf, in a palace built as a mirror image of the art museum across the square.
All Things to Do in Vienna
56 places, all reviewed and rated
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien
Vienna's great art history museum — one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings on earth, housed in a palatial 19th-century building built to hold it.
Belvedere (Upper Belvedere)
Prince Eugene's Baroque summer palace, now home to Gustav Klimt's The Kiss and the world's largest Klimt collection, with gardens sweeping down toward the Vienna skyline.
Schönbrunn Palace
The Habsburgs' vast Baroque summer palace — 1,441 rooms, gardens stretching to the Gloriette hilltop monument, and the residence where Maria Theresa raised 16 children and ran an empire.
Musikverein
Home of the Vienna Philharmonic and the world-famous New Year's Concert — a Golden Hall ranked among the best-sounding concert halls anywhere.
Austrian National Library — Prunksaal (State Hall)
One of the most beautiful libraries in the world — an 80-metre Baroque hall of gilded shelving, marble statues and a ceiling fresco, built to hold 200,000 historic volumes.
Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
Vienna's Natural History Museum — dinosaur skeletons, meteorites and the 29,500-year-old Venus of Willendorf, in a palace built as a mirror image of the art museum across the square.
Albertina
One of the world's greatest collections of drawings and prints — Dürer, Klimt, Picasso and Monet — inside a former Habsburg palace right behind the Opera.
Kaiserliche Schatzkammer (Imperial Treasury)
The Habsburgs' treasure vault inside the Hofburg — the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy Lance, and one of the world's largest cut emeralds.
Hofburg Palace
The Habsburgs' winter residence and seat of power for over 600 years — now home to the Austrian president, the Sisi Museum, the Imperial Treasury and the National Library under one sprawling complex.
St. Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom)
Vienna's Gothic mother church and most recognisable symbol — a free nave, a 137-metre south tower to climb, and a colourfully tiled roof visible across the city.
Karlskirche (St. Charles's Church)
Vienna's greatest Baroque church, built as a plague-vow monument — a glass panorama lift takes you up to eye level with the ceiling frescoes 32 metres overhead.
Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper)
One of the world's leading opera houses — a different production nearly every night of its roughly 300-show season, and standing-room tickets from a few euros for those who plan ahead.
Kirche am Steinhof (Otto Wagner Church)
Otto Wagner's Art Nouveau masterpiece, built for a psychiatric hospital in 1907 — gold-domed, sensitively designed for patients, and widely considered the finest Jugendstil church in the world.
Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial
Rachel Whiteread's 'Nameless Library' — a concrete monument of inside-out book shelves on a quiet square, commemorating 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Zentralfriedhof (Vienna Central Cemetery)
One of Europe's largest cemeteries, and the final resting place of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and the Strauss family — free, green and surprisingly peaceful.
Schönbrunn Zoo (Tiergarten Schönbrunn)
The world's oldest continuously operating zoo, founded in 1752 in the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace — pandas, elephants and a Baroque imperial pavilion turned zoo café.
Leopold Museum
The world's largest Egon Schiele collection, plus major Klimt works, inside a stark white cube at the heart of the MuseumsQuartier.
Third Man Museum
A dense, independently-run shrine to Carol Reed's 1948 film noir classic shot in bombed-out post-war Vienna — 2,500 original exhibits across 16 small rooms, including Anton Karas's zither.
Technisches Museum Wien
Austria's science and technology museum — trains, planes, a hands-on children's science floor and one of Europe's biggest collections of historic machinery.
Sisi Museum & Imperial Apartments
The private world of Empress Elisabeth ('Sisi') and Emperor Franz Joseph inside the Hofburg — bedrooms, salons and offices where they actually lived and worked.
Kunst Haus Wien — Museum Hundertwasser
The world's only permanent collection of Friedensreich Hundertwasser's work, inside a building he redesigned himself — wavy floors, irregular windows and no straight lines.
Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Museum of Military History)
Austria's military history museum, including the car Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in — the single object most directly tied to the start of World War I.
Weltmuseum Wien
Austria's leading ethnographic museum, inside the Hofburg's Neue Burg wing — Aztec, Benin, Pacific and Asian collections assembled over 150 years of Habsburg-era exploration.
Secession Building
The 1898 exhibition hall built by rebel artists including Klimt, crowned with a gilded dome of laurel leaves — still home to Klimt's Beethoven Frieze in its basement.
Vienna City Hall (Rathaus)
A vast neo-Gothic town hall on the Ringstrasse, its square hosting Vienna's Christmas market, summer film festival and ice-skating rink through the year — free guided tours three days a week.
Austrian Parliament Building
A Greek-revival temple to democracy on the Ringstrasse, guarded by a monumental Athena fountain — free guided tours through the recently renovated interior.
Spanish Riding School
Classical dressage with the famous white Lipizzaner stallions, performed in a Baroque riding hall inside the Hofburg — one of the 'Big Four' classical riding academies in the world.
Riesenrad (Giant Ferris Wheel)
The 1897 Ferris wheel at the entrance to the Prater — a Vienna icon, a Third Man film location, and still one of the most recognisable landmarks in the city skyline.
Peterskirche (St. Peter's Church)
A jewel-box Baroque church tucked just off the Graben — free, ornate, and one of Vienna's oldest Christian sites, with regular free organ concerts.
Burgtheater
Austria's national theatre and one of the German-speaking world's most prestigious stages — a grand Ringstrasse building with Klimt ceiling paintings above its staircases.
Naschmarkt
Vienna's largest and most famous market — 1.5km of food stalls, restaurants and spices along the Wienzeile, plus a sprawling flea market every Saturday.
Danube Island (Donauinsel)
A 21km artificial island built for flood control that doubled into Vienna's favourite free summer playground — beaches, bike paths, water sports and Europe's biggest free festival.
Grinzing & the Heuriger Wine Taverns
A fairy-tale wine village on Vienna's northern edge — cobbled lanes, ivy-covered houses and more than 25 traditional Heuriger taverns pouring the current year's local vintage.
Stadtpark
Vienna's grand 19th-century city park along the Wien River — landscaped English-style gardens anchored by the gilded Johann Strauss monument, one of the most photographed statues in Austria.
Kahlenberg
A 484-metre hilltop on the edge of the Vienna Woods with sweeping views over the entire city and the Danube — reachable by bus, tram-plus-hike, or a scenic drive.
Volksgarten
A formal 19th-century rose garden between the Hofburg and the Ringstrasse — the Theseus Temple, a monument to Empress Elisabeth, and one of the most fragrant free stops in central Vienna.
Vienna Woods & Heuriger Half-Day Tour
A guided half-day escape into the Wienerwald — forest walks, vineyard views and a stop at a traditional Heuriger wine tavern, without needing to plan transport yourself.
Sigmund Freud Museum
The apartment where Freud lived and worked for 47 years and invented psychoanalysis — recently doubled in size, with his private rooms open to the public for the first time.
Wien Museum
Vienna's own city-history museum on Karlsplatz — completely rebuilt and reopened in 2023, with a free permanent collection tracing 3,000 years of the city's story.
Jewish Museum Vienna
Two linked sites — Palais Eskeles and the Museum Judenplatz — covering over a thousand years of Jewish life in Vienna, including a medieval synagogue excavation and Holocaust memorial context.
Haus der Musik
An interactive sound and music museum in a former Habsburg palace — conduct a virtual Vienna Philharmonic, and trace the composers who made this city the capital of classical music.
MAK — Museum of Applied Arts
Design, furniture and decorative arts from the Vienna Secession to contemporary work, in a grand Ferstel-designed building illuminated nightly by a James Turrell light installation.
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna — Gemäldegalerie
A compact but serious Old Master picture gallery inside Vienna's art academy — home to Hieronymus Bosch's Last Judgement triptych, plus Rubens, Rembrandt and Titian.
Danube Tower (Donauturm)
Austria's tallest structure at 252 metres — two viewing decks, a revolving restaurant and a 40-metre outdoor slide spiralling down from near the top.
Votivkirche
A soaring neo-Gothic church built to thank God after Emperor Franz Joseph survived an assassination attempt — free to enter, with striking stained glass and twin spires visible across the Ringstrasse.
Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Pavilions
Otto Wagner's twin Art Nouveau railway pavilions on Karlsplatz — one now a small museum on Wagner himself, the other a working café, both textbook Jugendstil design.
Prater (Wurstelprater Amusement Park)
Vienna's historic public park and funfair — free to wander, with the Wurstelprater's rides, games and food stalls clustered around the base of the Riesenrad.
Third Man Vienna Sewer Tour
Walk the real sewer tunnels used in The Third Man's famous chase scene, with film clips, wartime context and the atmosphere of post-war occupied Vienna underground.
Vienna Classical Concert Experience
Evening Mozart and Strauss concerts by costumed orchestras in venues like the Musikverein and Konzerthaus — an accessible way to hear Vienna's classical tradition without opera-house-level planning.
Globe Museum (Globenmuseum)
A small, singular museum of historic terrestrial and celestial globes inside the Baroque Palais Mollard — over 600 globes, most predating 1850, the only museum of its kind in the world.
MUMOK — Museum Moderner Kunst
Vienna's museum of modern and contemporary art — Pop Art, Viennese Actionism and post-war abstraction, in a dark basalt cube next to the Leopold Museum.
Belvedere 21
The Belvedere's contemporary art venue — Austrian and international contemporary art, film and music in a modernist glass-and-steel pavilion originally built for Expo 58.
Hundertwasserhaus
A working apartment block redesigned by artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser — uneven floors, irregular windows, rooftop trees and no straight lines, free to view from the street.
Café Central
Vienna's most famous coffee house — the historic gathering place of Freud, Trotsky and Vienna's early 20th-century intellectual and literary scene, inside a magnificent former stock exchange.
Vienna Ring Tram
A dedicated yellow sightseeing tram that loops the entire Ringstrasse in about 25 minutes, with an 8-language audio guide narrating every major landmark along the route.
Mozarthaus Vienna
The only surviving Mozart residence left in Vienna — the apartment where he wrote The Marriage of Figaro and lived his most successful years.
Free Entry in Vienna
17 places with no admission charge
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