Graz

The Hauptplatz, the main square of the old town, is crossed by trams on their way through the centre. The town hall, a grand building of the late 19th century, fills one side, and in the middle stands the fountain of Archduke Johann, its four bronze women standing for the rivers of old Styria. At the corner of the Sporgasse, the Luegg houses carry rich baroque stucco on their fronts above a ground-floor arcade.

The Herrengasse, the main street of the old town, leads off the Hauptplatz between palaces and town houses, with trams running down its length. One of its houses, the Gemaltes Haus, has its whole front painted with baroque frescoes. A little further along, a gateway in the Landhaus, the seat of the Styrian parliament, opens onto an arcaded Renaissance courtyard, its slender columns carrying tiers of open galleries above the paving.

Beside the Landhaus, the Landeszeughaus, the Styrian armoury, still keeps its weapons in the building they were stored in, behind a doorway crowned by statues of Mars and Minerva. Inside, about 32,000 pieces — suits of armour, helmets, swords, pikes, muskets and pistols, mostly of the 16th and 17th centuries — fill four floors in long racks and rows, packed close together. The armoury is part of the Universalmuseum Joanneum, the Styrian state museum, which also runs the Kunsthaus and Schloss Eggenberg.

On the Kaiser-Josef-Platz, beside the opera house, farmers from the country around Graz set out vegetables, fruit, eggs, bread, cheese, cured meats and bottles of pumpkin-seed oil at their stalls every morning except Sunday, and the stalls change with the seasons of the Styrian farms. Like most shops in Austria, those of the old town close on Sundays too.

From the Hauptplatz, the narrow Sporgasse climbs towards the cathedral, a short walk uphill. Graz Cathedral is a late-Gothic church of the 15th century, built as the court church, with baroque altars standing beneath its Gothic vaults. Beside it rises the mausoleum of Emperor Ferdinand II, an early-baroque church crowned by domes, built as his burial place.

Next to the cathedral, the Burg, the old castle of the Habsburgs, now houses the Styrian government, and its courtyards can be walked through. In one of them, a double spiral staircase of 1499 winds up inside a stair tower: two stone stairs turning in opposite directions part and meet again at each landing. Beyond the courtyards lies the Burggarten, and past it the Stadtpark, a large park of lawns and old trees along the edge of the old town.

The Schlossberg, a wooded rock rising straight out of the old town, can be climbed three ways. From the Schlossbergplatz by the Mur, a stairway zigzags up the rock face and a lift rises inside the rock, while a funicular climbs from the Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Kai, a little further along the river. On the brow above the old town stands the Uhrturm, the clock tower that is the emblem of Graz; on its faces the long hand shows the hours and the short hand the minutes, the reverse of most clocks. Paths lead on through gardens across the top to the bell tower and to the casemates, the vaults of a former fortification, which serve as an open-air stage in summer. From the edges the view runs over the red roofs of the old town, the river and the hills around the city.

The Mur divides the old town on its east bank from the quarters of Lend and Gries on the west. Facing the old town across the river stands the Kunsthaus, built with the Murinsel for Graz's year as European Capital of Culture in 2003. Its bulging blue shell, studded with nozzle-shaped skylights and nicknamed the “Friendly Alien”, holds changing exhibitions of contemporary art. A short walk along the river, the Murinsel is a shell of steel and glass anchored in the current and joined to both banks by footbridges, so that walkers cross the Mur through it; one half of it holds a small amphitheatre, and it is lit after dark.

Behind the Kunsthaus spreads Lend, a quarter of older town houses whose ground floors hold small galleries, workshops, cafés and bars. At its heart, the Lendplatz has a farmers' market of its own in the mornings, Sundays excepted. By the river, the twin towers of the Mariahilferkirche rise above the Mariahilferplatz, and the Annenstraße runs from the river out to the main station.

On the western edge of the city, Schloss Eggenberg, a palace built in the 17th century for Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg, belongs to the same World Heritage listing as the old town. The palace is laid out as a picture of the calendar, its 365 windows standing for the days of the year and its 24 state rooms for the hours of the day. The state rooms, with their ceiling paintings and the Planetary Room, decorated with the planets and the signs of the zodiac, are seen only on guided tours in the warmer months of the year. The Alte Galerie, with paintings from the Middle Ages to the baroque, and an archaeology museum are housed in the palace and its park, a landscape garden of old trees and lawns where peacocks wander. A tram from the centre stops a few minutes' walk from the gate.