Where to Stay in Linz, Oberösterreich

What is Linz known for?

Linz is known for pairing heavy industry with a Baroque old town wrapped around Austria's largest main square. Steel built the modern city. Yet its riverfront tells another story, from the glowing glass box of the Lentos Art Museum to the Ars Electronica Center, a museum of the future that lights up the far bank of the Danube after dark.

The New Cathedral, the largest church in the country by capacity, rises over it all.

What are the main landmarks in Linz?

The New Cathedral towers over Linz as the country's largest church by capacity, its spire kept just below that of Vienna's Stephansdom by old imperial rule. Two more churches frame the story. The Old Cathedral and the Martinskirche, one of the oldest churches in Austria, hold the medieval thread, while the Minoritenkirche and the Karmeliterkirche carry the Baroque.

Along the water the Lentos Art Museum, the Ars Electronica Center and the Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum gather the city's modern collections.

What is the history of Linz?

Linz began as the Roman fort of Lentia, guarding a Danube crossing at the northern edge of the empire. The river made it. Through the Middle Ages it grew rich as a market and toll town where goods moving along the Danube changed hands, and the wide Hauptplatz was laid out to hold that trade.

The Old Cathedral and the Martinskirche survive from those centuries, the latter reaching back to the earliest Christian foundations in the region. Baroque wealth reshaped the centre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the astronomer Johannes Kepler spent years teaching in the town. Industry arrived with the railway and the river port.

In the twentieth century steel and chemicals turned Linz into one of Austria's great manufacturing hubs, a legacy that still defines its eastern quarters and its economy. Out of that industrial base grew an unexpected second identity, staked on new media and the electronic arts, which the Ars Electronica Center now embodies on the Danube's northern bank.

Where is Linz?

Linz sits in the far north of Austria, on both banks of the Danube where the river cuts through Oberösterreich a short drive south of the border with Czechia. The old town spreads across the south bank. Wooded hills rise close behind it, and the Pöstlingberg lifts a pilgrimage church over the rooftops on the northern, Urfahr side.

Downstream the Danube runs on toward the Wachau valley and, eventually, Vienna.

What is the climate of Linz?

Linz has a temperate central-European climate shaped by its position in the Danube basin. Winters are cold and often grey. Fog settles in the valley when cold air pools along the river, while summers turn warm and green with rain spread through the year.

Spring and autumn bring the mildest weather for walking the old town and the Donaulände.

How do you get to Linz?

Linz sits on the main rail line between Vienna and Salzburg, and fast trains reach it from either city in around an hour and a half. The station lies just south of the centre. Blue Danube Airport, west of the city near Hörsching, handles a modest schedule of flights, so many visitors fly into Vienna instead and continue by train.

Trams and the Pöstlingbergbahn cover the city itself, and river cruises call at the Danube quay.