Given it’s the capital and way, way bigger than any other Austrian city, it’s strange to find Vienna nowhere near the centre of the country.
- Vienna lies right in the east
- Location a legacy of the days of empire
- Book a classical concert experience* in Vienna
- See also:
Why not in the centre?
Austria is just under 600 km (373 miles) in length. Yet Vienna is so far east that the city limits are only about 30 km (17 miles) from the border with its eastern neighbour, Slovakia.
Vienna actually lies further east than the capitals of Czechia (Prague) and Croatia (Zagreb). Paris is almost closer to Austria’s western border than Vienna is.
So far off to one side seems a strange place to put your capital. But it’s all understandable when you take a little trip through history…
For many centuries prior to WWI, Vienna formed the administrative and political centrepiece of a huge informal empire, its successor Austrian empire, and the latter’s own successor: the Austro-Hungarian empire.
All of these empires featured rulers from the Habsburg dynasty and stretched much further north, east and south than today’s Austria. Vienna was actually in the western part: see, for example, the red dot on this map:
(The location of Vienna in the Austro-Hungarian Empire)
Austria-Hungary disintegrated post-WWI into independent states, and this left Vienna as the capital of “just” Austria (roughly the pink patch to the city’s west on the map).
So Vienna’s position is a historical anomaly: almost overnight it shifted from its western position in a large empire to its eastern position in a small democratic republic.
All this also explains why Vienna is so big compared to other Austrian towns and cities.
The “Imperial city” attracted a huge population from the empire and beyond: people looking for work, influence, music, culture, etc. And many stayed after 1918.
Vienna’s population is now just over 2 million, which makes it large even by US standards. The next-biggest city in Austria (Graz in the province of Styria) has a population of some 300,000.
One bonus of the unusual location is you can reach Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary very quickly. For example, a car drive takes you to any of their respective capitals (Bratislava, Prague and Budapest) in no more than 3-4 hours.
And, although Vienna is not in the Alps, the mountains are nearby, too. The first proper ski resorts begin around an hour’s drive away to the southwest, and the alpine foothills are even closer.