Ringstrasse

Street · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna, Austria

In 1857 Franz Joseph ordered the city walls demolished and a boulevard built on the cleared ground. The Ringstrasse is the result: a five-kilometre horseshoe around the old city, laid out on the glacis where nothing had been allowed to stand, and filled over the following decades with the buildings of a confident state. Each was given a historical style thought to argue for its function — Greek temple columns for the parliament, Flemish Gothic for the city hall, Renaissance for the theatre and the museums, an Italian humanist manner for the university. Art history took a term from it and calls the whole thing Ringstrasse style. Walking the loop takes a couple of hours. Riding it is what locals do, though no single tram has covered the whole Ring since 2008, so the full circuit now means one change. 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 as it goes round, and the fourth side of the circuit is not Ring at all but the quay along the Danube Canal, which is why it is a horseshoe rather than a ring.
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
No tram covers the whole circuit any more, so riding 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.
3
See what the Rathausplatz is holding
The square in front of the city hall is programmed all year and is never bare: an ice rink laid across it and threaded into the park through the winter, a free open-air film festival with a giant screen and food stands every night of the summer, and the largest Christmas market in the city from the middle of November. Whichever month you arrive in, something is standing on it.