Linz

The Hauptplatz is one of the largest enclosed market squares in central Europe — 13,000 square metres of baroque burgher houses around the white Pestsäule (the 1723 Trinity Column commemorating the end of the plague). The Altes Rathaus, the Schmidtberger Haus and the Feichtinger Haus with its glockenspiel face one another across the open space, and the narrow lanes north toward the Donaulände open out onto the river.

The Ars Electronica Center on the north bank of the Danube is one of Europe's leading media-arts museums, focused on the futures of science, technology and society. The 16-metre Deep Space 8K immersive visualisation hall, the AI Lab, the BioLab and the rotating annual Ars Electronica Festival in September make this the most consistent reason Linz holds its UNESCO City of Media Arts designation. The building's LED façade lights the river at night.

The Lentos Kunstmuseum directly across the river houses Upper Austria's modern art collection in a glowing translucent building completed in 2003 — the Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Beuys works are the headline holdings. Next door the Brucknerhaus concert hall and the Anton-Bruckner-Privatuniversität anchor the city's strong classical music tradition; the Linz International Brucknerfest each September fills both halls and the surrounding spaces.

The Pöstlingbergbahn — one of the steepest adhesion railways in the world — runs as a tram from the central Hauptplatz up the 11.6-percent gradient of the Pöstlingberg in twenty minutes. At the summit the twin-towered baroque pilgrimage basilica looks down over Linz and the Danube, the small Grottenbahn cave railway runs through a children's fairy-tale landscape inside the hilltop, and the Linzer Zoo extends across the slopes.

The Tabakfabrik — a vast 1929-1935 Peter Behrens steel-and-glass tobacco factory shuttered in 2009 — has been converted into a creative-industries campus housing design studios, tech firms, the Anton Bruckner electronic-music programme and one of the country's largest start-up clusters. Year-round events (Klangwolke, design forums, public concerts) make it the contemporary counterweight to the baroque centre.

The neo-Gothic Mariendom (Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception) is the largest church in Austria by capacity (20,000) and one of the largest in Central Europe by floor area, completed in 1924 after 62 years of construction. North of the city, the rolling granite hills of the Mühlviertel — a quiet, low-key region of small towns, traditional textile-print weaving (Blaudruck) and the country's largest network of working old-grain mills — open onto the Czech border at the Bavarian forest.

The Linzer Torte recipe, written down in 1653 in the cookbook of Countess Anna Margarita Sagramosa, is the world's oldest documented cake recipe — an almond, hazelnut and red-currant lattice tart. Konditorei Jindrak and Café Traxlmayr keep the original version on every menu. The Donaulände promenade between the Brucknerhaus and the river is the city's social spine on warm evenings, hosting the open-air Klangwolke concert that traditionally opens the Brucknerfest.