Austria is a landlocked federal republic in Central Europe of 83,879 km² (32,386 sq mi) and about 9.2 million people (2025 estimate), with Vienna as its capital and largest city. Its official language is German, and Burgenland Croatian, Hungarian and Slovene are also official in parts of Burgenland and Carinthia. The Alps cover about 62% of the country, and its highest peak, the Grossglockner, rises to 3,798 m. The Danube flows through Vienna. The Habsburgs ruled Austria for more than six centuries, from 1282 to 1918. Today the country is divided into nine states, touches eight neighbours and has been permanently neutral since 1955. The sections below take those facts region by region, starting with the capital in the east, climbing to the glaciers in the west and finishing in the flat lake country on the Hungarian border.
Vienna: Two Million People and Six Centuries of Habsburg Rule
Vienna is both a city and one of Austria's nine states, the smallest by area at 415 km² but the largest by population, with just over two million inhabitants and nearly 2.9 million in the metropolitan area, close to a third of the country. Its mayor ranks as a state governor, and its city council doubles as a state parliament, meeting separately for each role. It is the most populous city on the Danube and the fifth-largest city in the European Union.
The site began as Vindobona, a Roman fort on the Pannonian frontier, raised to a municipium with city rights in 212. Its modern importance comes from the House of Habsburg. Rudolf I, elected King of Germany in 1273, defeated Ottokar II of Bohemia on the Marchfeld, east of Vienna, on 26 August 1278, and in 1282 he acquired the Duchy of Austria for his family. Habsburgs then ruled Austria until the monarchy collapsed at the end of the First World War in 1918. From the 16th century Vienna was also the seat of the Holy Roman Emperors, a role it kept until the empire was dissolved in 1806, and from 1804 it was the capital of the Austrian Empire and, after 1867, of Austria-Hungary.
The dynasty's summer residence, Schönbrunn Palace in the 13th district, has 1,441 rooms and was inscribed by UNESCO with its gardens in 1996. Vienna lies on the eastern edge of the Vienna Woods, the last foothills of the Alps, at the point where the mountains give way to the Pannonian Basin, about 50 km from Bratislava and the Slovak border. More on the city's layout is in our guide to Vienna, Austria's capital.
Nine Federal States, from Lower Austria to 415 km² Vienna
The nine states are Burgenland, Carinthia, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Salzburg, Styria, Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Vienna, with capitals at Eisenstadt, Klagenfurt, Sankt Pölten, Linz, Salzburg, Graz, Innsbruck, Bregenz and Vienna itself. Each has its own parliament and governor, but Austrian federalism is weaker than Germany's: the states have no courts of their own, and their law-making covers fields such as zoning, nature protection, hunting and farming. The full list, with populations, is in how many states Austria has.
Tyrol, Carinthia and the Hohe Tauern: The 3,798 m Grossglockner
The Eastern Alps cover about 62% of Austria, and only 32% of the country lies below 500 m. Three ranges run west to east through it: the Northern Limestone Alps along the German border, the Central Alps, largely on a granite base, which are the highest and hold the permanent glaciers of the Ötztal Alps and the Hohe Tauern, and the Southern Limestone Alps on the Slovenian border. All three lose height as they run east.
The highest summit is the Grossglockner, 3,798 m, on the border of Carinthia and East Tyrol in the Hohe Tauern. What looks like a single pyramid is two pinnacles, the Grossglockner and the Kleinglockner (3,770 m), separated by a narrow col. Below its eastern face lies the Pasterze, about 8.4 km long, the longest glacier in Austria and in the whole of the Eastern Alps. It is retreating fast: GeoSphere Austria found that it has lost about 2 m of ice thickness each year since 2022. The Grossglockner High Alpine Road reaches it from Bruck in Salzburg state, climbing to 2,504 m at the Hochtor pass on the way to Heiligenblut in Carinthia.
All of this sits inside Hohe Tauern National Park, about 1,834 km² and by far the largest of Austria's seven national parks, which also holds the Krimml Waterfalls. Falling 380 m in three stages, they are the highest waterfalls in Austria. Further west, Tyrol controls the Brenner Pass at about 1,370 m, one of the lowest crossings of the main Alpine ridge and the historic road between Germany and Italy, and its capital Innsbruck hosted the Winter Olympics in both 1964 and 1976. Beyond Tyrol, Austria narrows to a corridor only 32 to 60 km wide between Germany and Italy, ending at Lake Constance in Vorarlberg.
Salzburg and the Salzkammergut: Salt, Mozart and Hallstatt
The name Salzburg combines the German Salz, "salt", with -burg, "settlement", and is traced to the barges that carried salt down the Salzach in the 8th century. Salt shaped the whole region north of the Alpine crest. In the Salzkammergut, the "salt domain" that runs east from Salzburg to the Dachstein massif, salt has been mined at Hallstatt since prehistoric times. The village gave its name to the Hallstatt culture of the Early Iron Age, about 800 to 450 BC, linked to early Celtic peoples, and the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape was inscribed by UNESCO in 1997.
Salzburg city, on the Salzach, was for centuries the seat of a prince-archbishopric, a church principality within the Holy Roman Empire, and its old town has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born there on 27 January 1756. He died in Vienna in 1791 at the age of 35, having completed more than 800 works, including symphonies, concertos and operas.
The Danube Lands: Linz, the Wachau and the Bohemian Massif
Most Austrians live not in the mountains but in the lowlands north and east of them. The Danube, the second-longest river in Europe after the Volga at 2,850 km, enters Austria from Germany and crosses Upper and Lower Austria past Linz, Krems and Tulln before flowing through Vienna towards Bratislava. The main Alpine rivers north of the watershed, the Inn, the Salzach and the Enns, all join it, while the Mur, Mürz and Gail of Styria and Carinthia drain south into the Drava, which reaches the Danube only far downstream, after a course of about 710 km. Only about 40% of Austria, some 35,000 km², counts as permanently settled land, and most of it lies in the Danube valley and the lowlands around the Alps.
Between Melk and Krems the river cuts a 36 km gorge called the Wachau, lined with vineyards, the abbeys of Melk and Göttweig, and the castle of Dürnstein, where Duke Leopold V of Austria held King Richard I of England captive. UNESCO listed the Wachau Cultural Landscape in December 2000. North of the river rises the Bohemian Massif, an older, lower range of granite that covers about 10% of Austria in the Mühlviertel and Waldviertel.
Burgenland and Lake Neusiedl: 114 Metres Above the Adriatic
Austria's easternmost state is also its flattest. Burgenland belonged to the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary until after the First World War, and it still has Croatian- and Hungarian-speaking communities whose languages share official status there. South-east of the low Leithagebirge the Alps finally end and the steppe of the Hungarian Plain begins.
Its centrepiece is Lake Neusiedl, the largest endorheic lake in Central and Western Europe. It covers about 315 km², of which 240 km² are in Austria and 75 km² in Hungary, but it is no more than 1.8 m deep, and its size changes with the weather: a flood in 1768 swelled it to 515 km². Lake Neusiedl and its surrounding villages became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. East of the lake, at Hedwighof in the municipality of Apetlon, lies Austria's lowest point, 114 m above sea level. Lake Constance in the far west and Lake Neusiedl in the far east, almost 600 km apart, mark the two ends of the country.
Eight Neighbours Along 2,534 km of Border
Austria's land borders total about 2,534 km and touch eight countries: Germany (801 km), Italy (404 km), the Czech Republic (402 km), Hungary (331 km), Slovenia (330 km), Switzerland (158 km), Slovakia (105 km) and Liechtenstein (34 km). The borders rarely follow the mountains; since the fall of Rome neither the Alps nor the Danube has served as a political boundary here. Each frontier is described in the countries that border Austria.
The State Treaty of 15 May 1955 and Permanent Neutrality
Austria's modern status dates from 1955. After its annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938 and a decade of occupation by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France from 1945, the four powers signed the Austrian State Treaty with the Austrian government at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna on 15 May 1955. It came into force on 27 July 1955. The breakthrough had come in talks with the Soviet Union early that year, after Austria promised perpetual neutrality; the last occupation troops left on 25 October, and on 26 October 1955 Parliament passed the Declaration of Neutrality as a constitutional law, pledging that Austria would never join a military alliance or allow foreign bases on its soil. It joined the United Nations the same year and the European Union in 1995, and it hosts both the OSCE and OPEC.