Ringstrasse

Street · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

A five-kilometre boulevard laid out around Vienna's old city where the walls came down in 1857, each grand building given a different historical style.

The Ringstrasse is a five-kilometre horseshoe of boulevard around Vienna's old city, laid out where the city walls once stood. On it, in order, are a parliament with Greek temple columns, a city hall in Flemish Gothic, a Renaissance theatre and twin Renaissance museums, and a university in an Italian humanist manner. Each was given the historical style thought to argue for its function, and art history took a term from it and calls the whole thing Ringstrasse style. In 1857 Franz Joseph ordered the walls demolished and the boulevard built on the cleared ground, the glacis, where nothing had been allowed to stand. It filled over the following decades with the buildings of a confident state. Walking the loop takes a couple of hours. Do it once in daylight for the architecture and once after dark, when the city hall, the parliament and the opera are floodlit and the traffic thins. The stretch by the city hall carries an ice rink in winter, films in summer and the largest Christmas market in the city.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The Ring is not one street name — it changes name nine times, and the fourth side is not Ring at all but the Danube Canal quay, so the circuit is a horseshoe.
Look up at the city hall spire — a figure called the Rathausmann stands on top of the ninety-eight-metre tower, and from the boulevard below he is a dark speck almost nobody picks out.
The traffic runs one way, clockwise — three lanes all moving in the same direction, which is worth remembering the first time you step off a kerb.

Things to do

1
Ride the Ring in two halves
Lines 1 and 2 between them cover the Ring, and since no single line goes all the way round any more it means one change on the far side. About half an hour in total, and the parliament, the city hall, the theatre, the university and the two museums go past the window in the order the boulevard was composed in.
2
Walk the stretch by the city hall at night
Between the Burgtheater and the Rathaus the buildings face each other across the boulevard and are floodlit after dark. The park in between is quiet, the trams pass every few minutes, and the scale is easier to take in on foot than from a seat. The square in front of the city hall is rarely empty either.