Tours in Austria

Start in a coffeehouse in Vienna, somewhere with worn velvet seats and a newspaper on a wooden stick, and you already understand something about Austria: it does not rush. Order a melange, watch the waiter move like the last two hundred years haven't changed his pace, and look out at a city built to be walked slowly, from the Ringstrasse round to the spires of St. Stephen's Cathedral and the long gravel paths of the Schönbrunn gardens. Vienna wants an afternoon per district, not a checklist.

Head west and the country turns alpine fast. Salzburg sits under its fortress with the Salzach river cutting through it, all narrow lanes and courtyards that open up when you least expect them. Innsbruck goes further, tucked right against the mountains so that you can be in a square lined with painted facades one minute and looking up at rock and snow the next. Between the cities, Austria is really about valleys: lakes in the Salzkammergut you swim in without quite believing the colour, villages that look arranged rather than built.

Then there is Klagenfurt, down in Carinthia by the Wörthersee, a smaller city that rewards paying attention to who actually lived in it. Walk the streets around Neuer Platz, past the statue of Maria Theresia, and you are walking through the working lives of women who ran buildings, sang opera, kept watch from towers, shaped the place quietly rather than loudly. It is the kind of city where the history is in the doorways and courtyards rather than in one big monument, and it is worth having someone point out which door belonged to whom.

We currently have a guide leading exactly that walk through Klagenfurt, tracing the women whose stories don't usually make the plaques. If your Austria trip has a gap for a smaller city with a personal story rather than a grand tour, that is where to spend it. For Vienna's palaces, Salzburg's old town or a hike above Innsbruck, ask, and a local guide can put something together.