Things to do
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Alter Dom
A Jesuit church of 1678, plain outside and dense with pink and grey stucco within, which served as the cathedral for only twenty-two years. Anton Bruckner was organist here for twelve of them and the instrument he played still stands. Free, dark, and a minute from the main square.
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Ars Electronica Center
A glass block on the north bank whose skin changes colour through the evening, given over to what technology is doing next: robotics, genetics, machine learning and a room that projects data at wall scale in three dimensions. Most of it is handled and not merely looked at. The roof terrace faces the old town.
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Hauptplatz
Thirteenth-century in plan and among the largest enclosed squares in Europe, at thirteen thousand square metres, with pastel baroque fronts on all four sides and a white marble plague column of 1723 in the middle. Trams run across the corner. The old town lanes behind the western side are where the bars are.
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Lentos Kunstmuseum
Austrian and international modernism from Klimt and Schiele forward, on the south bank behind a skin that is lit blue and pink after dark. Part of the collection was assembled in the 1950s to replace what the Nazis had removed from public galleries, and the museum says so on the wall. The riverside café is open late.
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Linzer Grottenbahn
Inside a fortress tower at the top of the Pöstlingberg, a small train shaped like a dragon runs through tunnels of fairy-tale tableaux built from 1906, with a mirrored dwarf city on the floor below. It is unabashedly of its period and much loved. Open from spring to autumn and at Christmas.
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Linzer Schloss
Frederick III's castle on the bluff over the river, rebuilt in 1600 and given a sheer south wing of glass and steel in 2009 after a fire left a gap. The provincial collections inside run from Bronze Age finds to Biedermeier furniture and weapons. The terrace gives the best line on the old roofs.
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Mariä-Empfängnis-Dom
Neo-Gothic, finished in 1924 after sixty-two years, seating twenty thousand and so the largest church in Austria by capacity, though its tower was deliberately built lower than St Stephen's in Vienna because the rules of the day required it. The stained glass includes a window showing the city as it stood in 1900.
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Pöstlingberg
The wooded hill north of the Danube, topped by a twin-towered pilgrimage church of 1748 that is the emblem on every postcard of the city. A terrace below it looks down the river and across to the Alps in clear weather. Restaurants sit beside the tram terminus and the walk down through the woods takes about an hour.
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Pöstlingbergbahn
An adhesion railway of 1898 climbing the hill on a gradient of one in ten without a rack, which was the steepest of its kind in the world when it opened and still ranks near the top. It was rebuilt in 2009 to run through from the main square. The ride takes about twenty minutes.