77 Fun Facts About Austria, Every One Fact-Checked

Austria is a landlocked country of nine federal states, 83,879 km² (32,386 sq mi) and about 9.2 million people, two-thirds of which sits above 500 m (1,640 ft) because most of it is mountain. Below are 77 facts about Austria, each one checked against an official or primary source, whether you are planning a trip, revising for a quiz or simply curious about the country.

Facts about Austria’s geography

Austria’s geography is defined by two things: it has no coast, and most of it is vertical. The first 14 facts cover the land itself.

1. Austria is a federation of nine states. They are Vienna, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Styria, Tyrol, Carinthia, Salzburg, Vorarlberg and Burgenland, and Vienna is both the capital and a state in its own right.
2. The country covers 83,879 km² (32,386 sq mi). That makes it slightly smaller than Portugal and slightly larger than the US state of Maine.
3. Austria is landlocked and borders eight countries. Germany to the northwest, Czechia to the north, Slovakia to the northeast, Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west.
4. Only 32% of Austria lies below 500 m (1,640 ft). Roughly two-thirds of the country sits higher than that, which is why it looks small on a map and takes so long to drive across.
5. The Großglockner is the highest mountain at 3,798 m (12,461 ft). The Wildspitze in Tyrol is second at 3,768 m (12,362 ft).
6. Forest covers about 47% of Austria. Nearly half the country is woodland, which surprises people who expect rock and snow.
7. The Danube is the second-longest river in Europe at 2,850 km (1,771 mi). Only the Volga is longer, and the Danube runs through or along the borders of ten countries, more than any other river in the world.
8. The Krimml Waterfalls are Austria’s highest, dropping 380 m (1,247 ft). They fall in three tiers: an upper drop of 140 m (459 ft), a middle drop of 100 m (328 ft) and a lower drop of 140 m again.
9. The top of the Krimml Waterfalls is 1,470 m (4,823 ft) above sea level. The flow varies hugely with the season, from about 5.6 cubic metres a second in June and July down to 0.14 in February.
10. Werfen has the largest ice cave in the world. The Eisriesenwelt runs for about 42 km (26.1 mi), and only the first section is ice.
11. Getting into the Eisriesenwelt takes 1,400 steps. There is also a 20-minute walk from the car park to the cable car and another 20 minutes from the top station to the cave mouth, and the cave is open daily from 1 May to 1 November.
12. Lake Constance is shared by three countries. Austria, Germany and Switzerland all have shoreline on the Bodensee, and the border across the open water has never been formally agreed.
13. One Austrian mountain hut stands on Swiss soil. The Heidelberger Hütte, at 2,264 m (7,428 ft) above the Paznaun valley in Tyrol, sits on the Swiss side of the border despite being run from Austria.
14. The Großglockner High Alpine Road climbs to 2,571 m (8,435 ft) over 48 km (29.8 mi) and 36 hairpin bends. It closes every winter and reopens in late spring.

Facts about Austria’s people and cities

Austria is a small country with one very large city and not much else, demographically speaking. These seven facts cover who lives where.

15. Austria’s population is about 9.22 million. Statistik Austria estimated 9,220,882 people in April 2026.
16. Population density is 109.9 people per km² (284.6 per sq mi). That is dense by Alpine standards and sparse by Western European ones.
17. Vienna holds about a quarter of the entire population. More than 2 million people live in the capital, which is why national statistics so often turn out to be Vienna statistics.
18. Every other Austrian city is tiny by comparison. Graz has 305,314 residents, Linz 213,557, Salzburg 157,659, Innsbruck 132,499 and Klagenfurt 105,256.
19. No Austrian city outside those six has more than 100,000 people. The country is one metropolis, five regional centres and a great many villages.
20. Vienna’s Central Cemetery holds more people than live in Vienna. The Zentralfriedhof has more than 330,000 graves and roughly 3 million people buried in them, across 2.4 km² (0.9 sq mi).
21. Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Salieri, Johann Strauss II and Arnold Schoenberg are all buried there. Mozart has a monument at the Zentralfriedhof and is actually buried at St Marx Cemetery, where the exact spot is unknown.

Facts about Austrian history

Austria spent six centuries as the seat of the Habsburgs and then spent the 20th century recovering from what came next. These ten facts cover the parts that still shape the country.

22. Schönbrunn Palace has 1,441 rooms. The Habsburgs’ summer residence in Vienna grew over three centuries from a hunting lodge built for a crown prince.
23. Schönbrunn has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. The palace and its gardens were inscribed together as a Baroque ensemble.
24. Habsburg rulers were buried in three places at once. Their bodies went into the Imperial Crypt beneath the Capuchin Church, their hearts into the Augustinian Church and their viscera into the Ducal Crypt at St Stephen’s Cathedral.
25. The Prater was an imperial hunting ground until 1766. Emperor Joseph II opened it to the public that year, and the swings, carousels and bowling alleys that followed grew into the Wurstelprater amusement park.
26. Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 and regained independence in 1955. The Austrian State Treaty ended ten years of Allied occupation.
27. Austria’s National Day is 26 October. It marks the constitutional law on permanent neutrality passed on that date in 1955, the day after the last occupying troops left.
28. Austria built a nuclear power station and never switched it on. A referendum on 5 November 1978 rejected the start-up of the finished Zwentendorf plant by 50.47% to 49.53%, a margin of fewer than 30,000 votes.
29. A law passed in 1978 banned fission reactors for electricity. No commercial nuclear power plant has ever operated in Austria.
30. Zwentendorf is now a training centre, a research site and a film set. It houses a photovoltaic research centre run with the Technical University of Vienna, and it has been rented out for films and music festivals.
31. Ötzi the Iceman was found in the Ötztal Alps on 19 September 1991, and he is Italian. A survey placed the discovery site 92.56 m (101 yd) inside Italy, and his body has been at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano since 1998. He lived around 3275 to 3230 BC and was about 45 when he was killed by an arrow.

Facts about Austrian music and art

Austria’s cultural exports are disproportionate to its size, and several of the institutions that produced them are still running. These 13 facts cover music, dance and the museums.

32. Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Johann Strauss II, Bruckner and Mahler were all Austrian. Beethoven was German and spent his adult life in Vienna, which is why he is buried there.
33. Franz Liszt is usually the exception people get wrong. He was born in Raiding, which is in the Austrian state of Burgenland today, but at the time it was in the Kingdom of Hungary, and he is counted as Hungarian.
34. Only one of Mozart’s Vienna apartments survives. It is at Domgasse 5, it was the largest of them, and it is now the Mozarthaus.
35. The Vienna Boys’ Choir traces back to a letter of 30 June 1498. Emperor Maximilian I instructed his court officials to employ a singing master, two basses and six boys, creating the Wiener Hofmusikkapelle. The modern choir was formally founded in 1924 and adopted the blue-and-white sailor suit.
36. The Salzburg Festival opened on 22 August 1920. It began with Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann on the steps of Salzburg Cathedral, and the play is still performed on Cathedral Square every year.
37. The Salzburg Festival runs five weeks from late July. It has done so almost every summer for more than a century.
38. The Bregenz Festival performs on the largest floating stage in the world. The Seebühne stands out in Lake Constance, and performances start at sunset.
39. The Spanish Riding School was first named in 1565 and is the oldest of its kind. A wooden riding arena was commissioned that year; the white Winter Riding School in the Hofburg where the Lipizzaner stallions perform was built between 1729 and 1735.
40. The waltz was born in Austria in the second half of the 18th century. It grew out of the German dance and the Ländler, and it was the first ballroom dance performed in a closed hold, which is exactly why it scandalised people.
41. The Viennese waltz is danced at about 180 beats per minute. That is roughly 58 to 60 bars a minute, exactly double the English or slow waltz, and it makes it one of the fastest ballroom dances there is.
42. Gustav Klimt was the first president of the Vienna Secession. He and a group of other artists quit the conservative Künstlerhaus in 1897 and built their own exhibition house, whose motto reads Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit: to every age its art, to art its freedom.
43. Vienna holds the world’s largest collections of both Schiele and Klimt. The Leopold Museum has the largest Egon Schiele collection anywhere and the Upper Belvedere has the largest set of Klimt paintings, including The Kiss. There is more on all of them in our guide to Vienna’s museums.
44. The Austrian National Library holds more than seven million objects. About three million of them are printed, and the manuscript collection runs from the 4th century AD to the present.

Facts about famous Austrians

Several of the people the world calls Austrian were born somewhere that is no longer Austria, which is what an empire does to a biography. These ten facts sort out who was who.

45. Sigmund Freud was not from Vienna. He was born in Freiberg in Moravia, now Příbor in Czechia, and moved to Vienna as a small child. He then lived and worked at Berggasse 19 for 47 years, until he fled to London in 1938.
46. Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen as well as founding Porsche. He was born in Maffersdorf, then in Austria-Hungary and now in Czechia.
47. Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Thal, a village near Graz. He became a US citizen and kept his Austrian citizenship too.
48. Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn in 1889 and left for Germany in 1913. The town has never known quite what to do about it.
49. Christian Doppler was born in Salzburg in 1803. The effect that carries his name explains why a siren changes pitch as it passes you.
50. The first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize was Austro-Hungarian. Baroness Bertha von Suttner won it in 1905, four years after the prizes began.
51. The father of modern genetics worked inside the Austrian Empire. Gregor Mendel ran his pea-plant experiments at St Thomas’s Abbey in Brno, then part of the empire and now in Czechia.
52. The chef Wolfgang Puck is Austrian. He was born in Sankt Veit an der Glan in Carinthia before building his career in California.
53. An Austrian tailor built one of the first sewing machines. Josef Madersperger of Tyrol worked on his design from the early 1800s and never made money from it.
54. Mach numbers are named after an Austrian physicist. Ernst Mach’s work on how air behaves above the speed of sound led Jakob Ackeret to coin the term in 1929.

Facts about Austrian food and drink

Austrian cooking is what happens when an empire collects recipes for six hundred years. These eight facts cover the parts that are legally defined, internationally protected or simply very old.

55. A Wiener Schnitzel has to be veal. Under the Austrian food code the name is reserved for a breaded veal escalope; the same thing made with pork must be sold as Schnitzel Wiener Art or similar. There is more on the national dishes in our guide to Austrian food.
56. Europe’s oldest restaurant is in Salzburg and has been serving since 803. St. Peter Stiftskulinarium, in the grounds of St Peter’s Abbey, has been feeding guests for more than 1,200 years.
57. Viennese coffee house culture is UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. It was added to the register in November 2011, in the category of social practices.
58. A Heuriger is a wine tavern where the grower serves their own new wine. They cluster in the villages on Vienna’s edge, they open seasonally, and families spend whole evenings in them.
59. The Mozartkugel was invented in 1890 by a Salzburg confectioner. Paul Fürst created it as the Mozart-Bonbon: a ball of pistachio marzipan wrapped in nougat and dipped in dark chocolate, on a stick, with the hole filled in afterwards.
60. Fürst never patented it, which is why there are so many. His descendants still make the Original Salzburger Mozartkugeln by hand, and a court settlement obliged his competitors to use other names.
61. Red Bull was created in Austria and launched in 1987. It is now the world’s biggest-selling energy drink.
62. Austrians take a coffee-and-cake break called Jause. It usually happens around three in the afternoon and it is closer to an institution than a snack.

Austrian firsts and records

Some of these titles are contested and some of them are not. These seven are the ones with a source behind them.

63. Vienna has the oldest zoo in the world. Tiergarten Schönbrunn was founded in 1752 as an imperial menagerie and is still open.
64. The postcard was invented in Austria. The post office of Austria-Hungary adopted the Correspondenz-Karte in October 1869, and three million were sent in the first three months.
65. The narrowest house facade in Europe is in Bregenz and measures 57 cm (22.4 in). The building at Kirchstraße 29, first recorded in 1796, has no side walls of its own, so the front door is wider than the facade and overlaps its neighbours.
66. One Austrian museum has a facade made of 16,656 concrete flowers cast from bottle bottoms. The vorarlberg museum in Bregenz used the bases of 13 kinds of ordinary PET bottle, in a design by the artist Manfred Alois Mayr, across about 1,300 m² (13,993 sq ft) of concrete.
67. Europe’s first modern church is in Vienna. Wien Museum describes Otto Wagner’s church of St Leopold am Steinhof, finished in 1907, that way, and it stands at the highest point of a former psychiatric hospital complex.
68. Vienna’s Postsparkasse used aluminium as a building material before anyone else did. Otto Wagner built it between 1904 and 1912 and used aluminium for the facade bolts, the roof figures, the railings, the door fittings and the warm-air blowers in the hall.
69. Innsbruck has hosted the Winter Olympics twice. The Games came to the Tyrolean capital in 1964 and again in 1976.

Facts about everyday life in Austria

These last eight are the things that actually affect you if you live there or drive there.

70. Austria uses the euro and is in Schengen but not in NATO. It is one of only four EU member states outside the alliance, alongside Cyprus, Ireland and Malta, since Finland and Sweden joined.
71. More than 60% of Austria’s electricity comes from hydropower. The rivers do most of the work, and renewables together account for the large majority of the country’s generation.
72. Austrian employees get at least five weeks of paid holiday. That is 25 working days a year on a five-day week, rising to 30 days after 25 years of service, on top of 13 public holidays.
73. Austrian men do six months of military service. Conscription still applies, with a longer civilian service available as an alternative.
74. Austria recommends a tick vaccination for the whole country, all year. Tick-borne encephalitis is endemic, the national vaccination plan addresses visitors specifically, and full protection takes three doses.
75. Austrian cows are walked down from the mountains in autumn, wearing headpieces. The Almabtrieb cattle drive happens through September and October, the decorations are made by hand, and the whole village turns out to meet the herd.
76. Winter tyres are a legal requirement in wintry conditions from 1 November to 15 April. You also need a vignette to use the motorways, bought online or at a petrol station near the border.
77. Mountain rescue is 140, except in one state. In Vorarlberg you dial 144 instead, which is worth knowing before you go walking in the Vorarlberg mountains. The European emergency number 112 works everywhere.

These fun facts posts are research-based and every fact above was checked against an official or primary source. If you spot something that looks wrong, please tell us at wanderer [at] wonderfulwanderings.com and we will look into it.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

Four of the facts above are worth acting on rather than just knowing.

1. Do not plan the Eisriesenwelt as a quick stop. It is open only from 1 May to 1 November, and between the car park, the cable car and the 1,400 steps inside, you need most of a day.
2. Save 140 and 112 before you go walking. Mountain rescue is 140 across Austria, except in Vorarlberg where it is 144, and 112 works from any phone with no SIM and no credit.
3. Order Wiener Schnitzel by the name and check the menu. If the menu says Schnitzel Wiener Art, you are getting pork, which is legal, cheaper and not the same dish.
4. Book winter tyres with any hire car between 1 November and 15 April. The requirement is situational rather than a blanket rule, and any Alpine trip in that window meets the condition.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the team has travelled Austria from Vienna and Salzburg to Tyrol, Carinthia, Styria and Vorarlberg, walking the mountains and eating the schnitzel that several of these facts describe. The team covers Austria for independent travellers, including the museums, mountain huts, festivals and food worth planning a trip around, and re-checks the facts on this page against their sources when figures change.