Rebecca Engel
Vienna gets nearly all of Austria’s attention, and it has earned plenty of it. But there’s a city two and a half hours south with a UNESCO old town, red tile roofs stacked up against a green hill, and a fraction of the crowds. It’s called Graz, and after a day of walking around it you might have trouble calling Vienna the prettiest city in the country.
Graz is Austria’s second largest city, though it never feels like it. The old town is small enough to cross on foot in fifteen minutes, the hills start right where the streets end, and roughly one in five people living there is a student. The strange part is how few travelers put it on the map at all. Vienna and Salzburg soak up almost all of Austria’s tourism, and Graz just sits there being beautiful with hardly anyone looking.
Wait, Where Is Graz?
Graz sits in the southeast corner of Austria, in a region called Styria, close enough to Slovenia that the food and the weather both start to feel a little Mediterranean. The train from Vienna takes about two and a half hours and runs several times a day.
About 300,000 people live there, plus around 60,000 students spread across four universities. That mix matters. It means the old town isn’t a museum piece with gift shops and nothing else. There are cheap lunch spots, packed bars, and locals actually using the squares on a Tuesday night.
The whole historic center went on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999, and Eggenberg Palace was added in 2010. Graz was also the European Capital of Culture in 2003, which is when a few of the stranger buildings showed up.
The Old Town Looks Like a Movie Set
Here’s the thing about Vienna. It’s magnificent, but it’s magnificent at an imperial scale, all wide boulevards and enormous facades built to impress foreign diplomats. Graz is the opposite. It’s tight, warm, and Italian in a way that catches people off guard.
That’s not an accident. Italian architects built much of the old town during the Renaissance, back when Graz was a Habsburg seat and the money was flowing in from the south. The result is a center that feels more like northern Italy than the rest of Austria.
Hauptplatz and the Town Hall
The main square is the obvious starting point. The town hall dominates one end with its domes and spires, and the buildings curving around the square are painted in soft creams, pinks, and yellows.
Sausage stands park in the middle of it, which sounds like it would ruin the atmosphere and somehow doesn’t. Grab a bratwurst, stand there for ten minutes, and watch the trams come through. That’s the whole experience.
Herrengasse and the Streets Around It
Herrengasse runs south from the main square and it’s the busiest street in the city, lined with painted townhouses and arcades. Trams glide down the middle of it while everyone else walks.
Duck off it and things get better. Sporgasse narrows and curves uphill with shops tucked into old buildings. The Landhaus courtyard, just off Herrengasse, is a three story Renaissance arcade that looks like it was picked up in Verona and set down here. It’s free to walk into and most people miss it entirely.
The Rooftops Are the Whole Point
Graz has one visual signature and it’s the roofs. Thousands of orange and red clay tiles, all different ages and shades, layered over each other in a way no modern city gets to have anymore.
You notice them from the street, but they don’t really land until you’re standing above them. That’s what the hill in the middle of town is for.
Schlossberg Has the Best View in Austria
Right in the middle of the city there’s a wooded hill about 400 feet high with a fortress on top. Napoleon’s army spent years failing to take it and eventually got the fortifications torn down as part of a peace treaty. The locals paid to save two pieces: the bell tower and the clock tower.
The Clock Tower Everyone Comes For
The Uhrturm is the postcard shot of Graz, a squat white tower with a wooden gallery and a giant clock face on each side. It’s been up there since the 1500s.
Look closely at the hands. The big one points to the hour and the small one to the minutes, which is backwards from every other clock you’ve seen. Back when it was built the tower only had an hour hand, and when the minute hand was added later nobody wanted to shrink the original.
Getting Up There
There are three ways up and all of them are fun. The Schlossbergbahn funicular hauls you up at a steep angle in about two minutes. There’s also a glass elevator cut straight through the rock.
Or you climb the Kriegssteig, a zigzag of about 260 stone steps carved into the cliff face by Russian prisoners during the First World War. It’s a real climb but it’s shaded and the views open up the whole way.
Coming down, there’s a fourth option. A slide runs 175 meters through the inside of the hill, dropping you back at street level in about 40 seconds. It’s the longest underground slide in the world and adults ride it more than kids do.
The View Over the Red Roofs
At the top you get the payoff. The old town spreads out below in a sea of tile roofs, church spires poke up through it, the Mur river cuts along one side, and green hills close in the background.
Vienna has nothing like this. There’s no hill in the middle of it, no single spot where the whole historic core lies out in front of you. That’s the honest case for Graz being the prettier city, and it takes about five seconds at the top of Schlossberg to make it.
The Weird Modern Side Nobody Expects
For a city this old, Graz has a surprising amount of strange contemporary architecture, most of it dropped in for the 2003 Capital of Culture year. It shouldn’t work next to 500 year old buildings. It absolutely does.
The Friendly Alien
The Kunsthaus is a modern art museum shaped like a giant blue blob with tubes sticking out of the top. Locals call it the Friendly Alien and the nickname stuck so hard that the museum uses it too.
At night the whole skin lights up and can display patterns and text. Seeing it sit there among the red roofs is genuinely one of the odder sights in Europe, and it looks better in person than it does in photos.
The Murinsel
The other 2003 addition is an artificial island in the middle of the river, designed by the American artist Vito Acconci. It’s a steel and glass shell shaped a bit like a seashell, connected to both banks by walkways.
Inside there’s a cafe, a small amphitheater, and a playground. Sit there with a coffee and watch the water move underneath you. It costs nothing to walk on.
Eggenberg Palace Is Worth the Tram Ride
Fifteen minutes west of the center on tram line 1 sits a palace built around a calendar. Eggenberg has 365 exterior windows for the days of the year, 31 rooms on the main floor for the days of a month, and 24 state rooms with 52 windows between them for the hours and weeks.
The state rooms are covered floor to ceiling in painted panels and can only be seen on a guided tour. The gardens are the easier sell. They’re open most of the year, they’re full of peacocks wandering around like they own the place, and they cost a couple of euros to enter.
The Food Is Where Graz Really Beats Vienna
Styria calls itself the green heart of Austria and it grows most of the country’s good produce. Graz gets first pick of all of it.
The thing to try is pumpkin seed oil. It’s dark green, almost black, thick, and tastes deeply nutty. Styrians put it on salads, on soup, on cheese, and even over vanilla ice cream, which sounds wrong and is fantastic. The protected version is worth buying a bottle of to take home.
For markets, head to Kaiser Josef Platz on a weekday morning, where farmers sell produce, cheese, and bread out of stalls just south of the opera house. The city also has a proper food hall culture and a set of casual wine taverns called buschenschank, where the wine is made by the family pouring it and the food comes on a wooden board.
Prices are the other half of this. Graz runs noticeably cheaper than Vienna for a meal out, a coffee, or a hotel room, and the quality doesn’t drop to match.
Easy Day Trips Into Styria
An hour south of the city, right along the Slovenian border, the South Styrian Wine Road winds through steep green hills covered in vineyards. People compare it to Tuscany and the comparison holds up better than it has any right to. The road twists between small family wineries, and the white wines here are some of the best in Central Europe.
East of Graz, Riegersburg Castle sits on top of an old volcanic plug with cliffs dropping away on every side. It’s about an hour by car and there’s a chocolate factory at the base of it that runs tours.
Both are much easier with a rental car. Buses run, but they run slowly and not often enough to build a day around.
How to Visit Graz From Vienna
Trains leave Vienna’s main station for Graz throughout the day and take about two and a half hours. Booking a few weeks out gets you a fare in the 20 euro range. Graz also has a small airport with flights from a handful of European cities.
Two full days covers the city comfortably. One day gets you the old town and Schlossberg, and the second gives you Eggenberg, the markets, and time to sit somewhere without a plan. Add a third if you want a day trip out to the wine country.
Late spring and early fall are the best windows. May, June, and September bring warm days without the August heat, and the vineyards south of town look their best right around the harvest in late September and October. Winter is cold and quiet, though the Christmas markets in the squares are lovely and far less crowded than Vienna’s.
Once you’re there, skip the taxis. The old town is walkable end to end and the tram network handles everything else for a couple of euros.
Final Thoughts
Nobody is arguing that Vienna isn’t worth visiting. It’s one of the great cities in Europe and the museums alone justify the trip. But Vienna is also crowded, expensive, and grand in a way that keeps you at arm’s length.
Graz is the opposite kind of pretty. It’s compact, warm, and lived in, with a hill in the middle that hands you the best city view in Austria for the price of a funicular ticket. Give it two days on your next Austria trip. Odds are good it ends up being the part you talk about when you get home.
