The 11 Best Travel Experiences in Austria

Hallstatt is a tiny lakeside village in the Austrian Salzkammergut, wedged onto a narrow shelf between steep mountains and the water.

Its salt mine has been worked for around 7,000 years, making it one of Europe's oldest continuously exploited industrial sites, and the Iron Age culture excavated here is named after the village.

Pastel Renaissance houses stack up from the shoreline in a place barely a few streets deep.

Mozart's birthplace hosts one of the world's most prestigious classical music festivals each summer, staging opera, orchestral concerts, and theatre across venues from the grand Felsenreitschule - a riding school carved into a cliff face - to smaller baroque halls.

Founded in 1920 and still run to famously exacting standards, tickets for its top opera productions are among the hardest and most expensive in classical music to secure.

Salzburg's baroque old town sits below a hilltop fortress on the banks of the Salzach River, its narrow lanes lined with Mozart's birthplace, elaborate church facades, and the gardens used as filming locations for The Sound of Music.

The Hohensalzburg Fortress, one of Europe's largest surviving medieval castles, looms over the skyline and is reachable by funicular, and music runs through the city year-round.

The Grossglockner High Alpine Road climbs through 36 hairpin bends to over 2,500 metres, threading past Austria's highest peak and ending at a viewpoint over the Pasterze, the country's largest glacier.

Marmots and ibex are a common sight along the route, and a dozen or so panoramic pull-offs give reason to stop every few kilometres.

The road is only open from May to October, closing once snow makes the high pass impassable.

Vienna spent centuries as the seat of the Habsburg Empire, and the grandeur shows — the Ringstrasse boulevard circles an old town of imperial palaces, opera houses, and coffee houses that have hosted composers and philosophers for 300 years.

The Hofburg and Schönbrunn palaces anchor the city's imperial history, while the Naschmarkt and Prater park show its more everyday side.

The Habsburgs 1,441-room summer residence in Vienna, its ochre facade facing formal parterres that climb to the Gloriette on the ridge behind.

Forty rooms are open, among them the Hall of Mirrors where a six-year-old Mozart is said to have played for Maria Theresa.

The grounds also hold the oldest surviving zoo in the world.

Melk Abbey is a baroque Benedictine monastery perched on a rocky outcrop above the Danube, marking the eastern gateway to the Wachau Valley's vineyards.

Its library holds tens of thousands of historic volumes beneath elaborate ceiling frescoes, and the abbey church's gold-and-marble interior is one of the most ornate in Austria.

The terrace outside gives a wide view down over the river and the town of Melk below.

The Krimml Waterfalls drop 380 metres in three tiers down a forested mountainside in the Hohe Tauern National Park, among the highest waterfalls in Europe.

A well-graded path climbs alongside the falls through spray-cooled air, with viewing platforms at each tier and a small waterfall-themed nature trail for families lower down.

On sunny mornings, rainbows form regularly in the mist at the base of the lower tier.

The Nordkette range rises so steeply above Innsbruck that a cable car runs directly from the edge of the old town to a mountain station above 2,300 metres in under 20 minutes.

From the top, the view takes in the Alpine capital below and rows of peaks stretching into Italy and Germany, and hiking trails and via ferrata routes continue further up the ridge.

A narrow alpine lake in Austria's Salzkammergut lake district is ringed by forested peaks and postcard villages, the best-known of which, St.

Wolfgang, grew up around the lakeside White Horse Inn made famous by a 20th-century operetta.

Passenger ferries still cross the lake between villages, a rack railway climbs the Schafberg for panoramic views, and swimming spots line much of the shore in summer.

A flat, paved path traces the Danube's south bank through the Wachau, a UNESCO-listed valley of terraced vineyards, apricot orchards and medieval river towns between Melk and Krems.

Riders pass beneath Durnstein's ruined castle, where Richard the Lionheart was once imprisoned, while Melk's baroque abbey looms over the starting point.

The gentle downhill gradient and dedicated bike lane make it an easy half-day ride at any fitness level.