Vienna's Ringstrasse: The Grand Boulevard That Replaced the City Walls

From the imperial stables to Otto Wagner's bank: museums, parliament, city hall, theatre and university, the showpieces an emperor built where Vienna's walls once stood

Vienna · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. MuseumsQuartier & the Imperial Stables

Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien, Austria

Stand in the big courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier and turn slowly around: a long baroque front behind you, a white limestone cube on one side, a dark grey block on the other, and people stretched out on huge plastic loungers as if this were a beach. Two and a half centuries of Vienna are arguing in one square... and the argument started with horses.

This was the imperial court stables, the Hofstallungen, planned by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and built from the 1720s under his son. Its front runs for roughly 350 metres, and behind it lived hundreds of horses, with carriages, grooms, harness rooms and riding halls. In the eighteenth century it stood outside the city, looking across an empty strip of grass towards the walls.

That empty strip is the key to this whole walk. After the Ottoman siege of 1683, Vienna kept its walls and a wide glacis in front of them, a field of fire where nothing could be built. By the 1850s the walls were useless against modern artillery and a corset for a city of around half a million people. On 20 December 1857 the young Emperor Franz Joseph signed a decree that began with the words Es ist Mein Wille... it is My will... and ordered them torn down.

In their place came the Ringstrasse, a boulevard about five kilometres long and some 57 metres wide, opened with a ceremony on 1 May 1865. Building plots were sold to bankers, industrialists and aristocrats, and the money helped pay for museums, a parliament, a university and theatres. Historians call the result the Ringstrasse style: every public building dressed in the historical costume its builders thought it deserved.

The stables themselves became a museum district in 2001. The white cube is the Leopold Museum, which holds the world's largest collection of Egon Schiele, the young painter who scandalised this city around 1910 and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 at just 28. Now walk out through the main gate, cross the road, and step into the garden between two palaces that look like twins.
2. Maria-Theresien-Platz: Art History & Natural History Museums

Maria-Theresien-Platz, 1010 Wien, Austria

Between two palaces that look like twins, an empress sits on a bronze throne high above the clipped hedges, one hand holding a document, the other stretched out over her lands. Maria Theresa, the only woman ever to rule the Habsburg dominions in her own right, is surrounded by her generals on horseback and her ministers and advisers on foot.

The monument, by Caspar von Zumbusch, was unveiled in 1888. The twin buildings are the Kunsthistorisches Museum, art history, on your right as you face the Hofburg, and the Naturhistorisches Museum, natural history, on your left. Both were designed by Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer, and the joke is that they are near mirror images on the outside... while inside, Rubens and Raphael face meteorites and dinosaurs.

The natural history museum keeps one of the most famous small objects on earth, the Venus of Willendorf, a limestone woman only eleven centimetres tall, carved nearly 30,000 years ago and found in 1908 in the Wachau valley on the Danube. Across the square, the art museum holds the largest collection of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder anywhere, among them the Tower of Babel and the Hunters in the Snow.

The museums opened in 1889 and 1891, and they were only half of a dream. Semper planned an imperial forum: two new wings of the Hofburg across the Ring, joined to these museums by triumphal arches over the road, one gigantic ceremonial square. Only one wing, the Neue Burg, was ever built, and the arches never came. The empire ran out of time before it ran out of ambition.

Before you go, look up at the two domes. The art museum is crowned by Pallas Athena, the natural history museum by Helios, the sun god... wisdom on one side, the forces of nature on the other. Now walk north along this side of the Ring, with the Volksgarten across the road on your right, to a Greek temple that Vienna built for its lawmakers.
3. Parliament & the Pallas Athena Fountain

Dr.-Karl-Renner-Ring 3, 1010 Wien, Austria

Face the long double ramp of the Austrian Parliament, with bronze horse tamers wrestling their stallions at its foot, and let your eyes climb to a temple front of white columns. You might think you had been teleported to Athens. That was exactly the idea.

The architect, Theophil Hansen, was a Dane who had worked for years in Athens, and he built this house for the Reichsrat, the imperial parliament, between 1874 and 1883. He chose Greek forms on purpose, because Greece meant democracy. It was a bold message in a monarchy where the emperor still appointed the government, and where the chamber had to hold deputies from Bohemia to Galicia speaking many different languages. In 1897, in a bitter fight over language laws, one deputy, Otto Lecher, spoke for some twelve hours through the night to block a vote.

In front stands the Pallas Athena fountain, completed in 1902: the goddess of wisdom in helmet and armour, a small winged Victory in her hand. Below her, reclining figures stand for the great rivers of the old empire, the Danube, the Inn, the Elbe and the Vltava. The Viennese have a dry joke about her... wisdom stays outside, with her back turned to the politicians.

The ramp has seen real history. On 12 November 1918, after the empire collapsed, the republic was proclaimed here before a vast crowd, and shots and panic broke out on the ramp. In March 1933 Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss used a procedural crisis to shut parliament down and rule by decree, and five years later Hitler's Germany swallowed the country. Parliamentary democracy only returned to this building in 1945.

After a long renovation the building reopened in January 2023, with a new glass roof over the main chamber, and visitors can again walk where the deputies argue. Now continue north along the Ring. Across the park on your left a neo-Gothic giant rises above the trees, with a little iron knight standing on top of its tower.
4. Rathaus: Vienna City Hall & the Rathausmann

Rathausplatz 1, 1010 Wien, Austria

Walk into the Rathausplatz and let the City Hall fill your view: pointed arches, stone lacework, a forest of pinnacles and, in the middle, a tower nearly a hundred metres high. It looks as if it had been shipped in from medieval Flanders... and in a sense it was.

The architect, Friedrich von Schmidt, had spent years working on Cologne Cathedral, and he built this between 1872 and 1883, borrowing from the old town halls of Flanders and Brabant. The Gothic was a message, just like Hansen's Greek columns next door. It recalled the proud medieval cities that governed themselves, and Vienna's liberal burghers wanted to say exactly that, a few hundred metres from the emperor's palace.

On top of the tower stands the Rathausmann, an iron knight in armour holding a pennant, about three and a half metres tall without his flagpole. The story goes that no tower in the new quarter was allowed to rise higher than the spires of the Votivkirche nearby. Schmidt obeyed, kept his tower itself just below them... and then put the knight on top, which carries the whole thing over the limit. Viennese cunning, cast in iron.

The ground under the square was once a military parade ground, part of the glacis that the army was reluctant to give up, and the city only won it after long negotiations. Today the park in front fills with an ice rink and a Christmas market in winter and an open-air music film festival in summer, when thousands watch opera on a giant screen against that Gothic facade.

Inside work the mayor and council of a city of around two million people. Vienna is also one of Austria's nine federal states, so the mayor is a state governor too, and the council doubles as a state parliament. Now cross the Ring to the far side and face the building the City Hall was built to look at: the court theatre.
5. Burgtheater

Universitätsring 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

From the edge of the Rathauspark you can see the Burgtheater stretched along the Ring: a curved central front and two long wings reaching out like arms. Above the entrance Apollo sits between the muses of tragedy and comedy, and along the facade the busts of playwrights keep watch, Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe and Austria's own Franz Grillparzer among them.

The court theatre is much older than this building. Empress Maria Theresa founded it in 1741 in a converted ball-game hall beside the Hofburg on Michaelerplatz, and Mozart premiered operas there, The Marriage of Figaro among them, in 1786. The company only moved into this palace by Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer in October 1888, and it is still one of the great stages of the German-speaking world. For generations its actors set the standard for spoken German, so much so that Burgtheater German became a phrase of its own.

Inside, on the ceilings of the two grand staircases, are paintings by a young team that called itself the Künstler-Compagnie: Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst and their friend Franz Matsch. Gustav was in his mid-twenties. In one scene, a performance at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, he painted himself into the audience, and that little face is said to be the only self-portrait of the man who later made gold his signature.

The grand new house had one embarrassing flaw: from some seats you could hardly hear the actors, and from others you could hardly see the stage. Critics mocked it, and within ten years the auditorium was rebuilt. In April 1945 the theatre burned after bombing and fighting, and the company played in borrowed halls until the restored house reopened in October 1955, a few weeks before the State Opera.

Right next door is Café Landtmann, open since 1873, one of the classic coffee houses of the Ring, where actors, journalists and politicians still meet. Now cross the Ring once more, towards the long Renaissance palace of learning opposite.
6. University of Vienna Main Building

Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria

In front of you stretches the main building of the University of Vienna, a long Renaissance palace with a raised central entrance and ramps on either side. If the doors are open, walk through to the great arcaded courtyard: a quiet square lined with busts and plaques of famous professors, a hall of fame in stone.

The university is far older than its home. Duke Rudolf the Fourth founded it in 1365, which makes it the oldest university still operating in today's German-speaking world. This building, by Heinrich von Ferstel, opened in 1884, and the Renaissance style was chosen deliberately: it pointed back to the Italian universities where modern science and humanism were born. Sigmund Freud studied medicine in these institutes, and the physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Kurt Gödel passed through them too.

Then there is the scandal of the ceiling. Around 1900 the university commissioned Gustav Klimt to paint three great allegories for its ceremonial hall: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. Instead of noble figures of wisdom, he delivered floating naked bodies, sickness and death, and a condemned man wrapped by a sea monster. Dozens of professors signed a protest, parliament debated it, and Klimt finally returned his fee and took the paintings back.

They were destroyed in May 1945, when retreating German troops set fire to a castle in Lower Austria where they had been stored. Today the ceremonial hall shows black and white reproductions in their place, ghosts of a lost masterpiece.

The arcades have a darker side too. Women were only admitted to study here from 1897, and for years only men were honoured in stone. In the 1930s the university was a centre of violent antisemitism, and after 1938 hundreds of teachers and over two thousand students were driven out, most of them Jewish. Memorials now remember them. Walk north across the little park towards the two lacy spires you have been seeing above the trees.
7. Votivkirche

Rooseveltplatz, 1090 Wien, Austria

Two openwork spires shoot up nearly a hundred metres from the far side of the park, pale stone carved like lace. The Votivkirche looks like a medieval cathedral from France or the Rhineland, but every stone of it was laid in the nineteenth century, and the reason it exists is a knife.

On 18 February 1853 the 22-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph was walking on the city walls when a Hungarian journeyman tailor, János Libényi, attacked him from behind, furious at the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1848. The blade struck the back of the emperor's neck, but the stiff high collar of his uniform took much of the blow. An officer and a passing Viennese butcher overpowered the attacker, who was later hanged.

The emperor's younger brother, Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, called for a church of thanksgiving, a votive church, and some 300,000 people across the empire gave money. The competition was won by Heinrich von Ferstel, who was not yet thirty, the same Ferstel who would later build the university. The foundation stone was laid in 1856, and the church was consecrated in 1879, on the silver wedding anniversary of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth.

Ferdinand Maximilian's own story ended far away. He accepted the crown of Mexico and was executed by a firing squad there in 1867, twelve years before the church he had campaigned for was finished. Inside, among the side chapels, lies a much older Viennese hero: the Renaissance tomb of Count Niklas Salm, who commanded the defence of the city during the first Ottoman siege of 1529.

The church was begun on the open glacis before the Ring even existed, one of the first great buildings of the new Vienna, and its spires set the height limit for everything around it. Now turn back towards the old city and walk down to one of the last surviving stretches of the walls, where Beethoven once rented rooms with a view.
8. Mölker Bastei & Beethoven's Pasqualatihaus

Mölker Bastei 8, 1010 Wien, Austria

Climb the few steps onto the Mölker Bastei, a raised terrace of old houses above the street, and you are standing on one of the very few surviving pieces of the fortifications the Ring replaced. Below you the traffic flows where the moat and glacis once were; up here the lane is quiet, and one tall house carries a plaque for Beethoven.

The bastion takes its name from the Melkerhof, the town house of the great Benedictine abbey of Melk on the Danube, which still stands just behind you. When the demolition crews tore down the walls from 1858 onwards, this short stretch survived with its houses on top. It gives you the scale of what was lost: the defences were not a thin wall but a massive belt of earth and masonry several storeys high.

Beethoven lived in the house at number 8, which belonged to Baron Pasqualati, on and off between 1804 and 1815, on the fourth floor. That was remarkable loyalty for a man who moved dozens of times in Vienna, quarrelling with landlords and neighbours. Here he worked on his opera Fidelio and on parts of several symphonies, the Fifth among them. The story goes that his landlord kept the rooms free for him even when he had moved out.

Why did he love it? The view. From the upper windows, before the Ringstrasse buildings rose, he could look out over the open glacis to the suburbs and the hills of the Vienna Woods beyond. The apartment is now a small museum, and climbing the stairs to it tells you something about the half-deaf, impatient genius who climbed them every day.

Look across the Ring and you can see what replaced Beethoven's view: university, theatre, apartment blocks. Now come down from the bastion and follow the Ring north-east along the Schottenring, to a red palace that was built for money.
9. Börse: the Former Vienna Stock Exchange

Schottenring 16, 1010 Wien, Austria

Stop in front of a long palace of red brick trimmed with pale stone, with arched windows, corner pavilions and a stately entrance. This is the former Vienna Stock Exchange, and its colour even has a nickname in town, Hansen red, after the same Danish architect who built the parliament.

It was planned in boom times. In the 1860s and early 1870s Vienna went wild for shares: railway companies, banks and building societies, many of them financing the Ringstrasse itself. Then, on 9 May 1873, barely a week after the World Exhibition opened in the Prater, the market collapsed. Black Friday wiped out fortunes within hours, banks failed, and a wave of suicides followed. Liberal confidence never fully recovered, and the resentment of the ruined was soon exploited by antisemitic politicians. That summer cholera broke out, and the visitors the exhibition had counted on stayed away.

So Hansen's exchange, built between 1874 and 1877, opened into the long depression that followed the crash. Many of the families who built palaces along the Ring were Jewish bankers and industrialists, the Ephrussi, the Todesco, the Epstein, and their salons and patronage became part of the city's culture. That world ended in 1938 with confiscation, flight and murder.

In 1956 a fire gutted the great trading hall. The facades survived and the interior was rebuilt, and the trading of shares has long since moved onto screens and away from the old floor. Restored, the building has found new uses, but the facade still tells the story of a city that bet everything on its own future.

The street is called Schottenring after the Schottenstift, the Scots Abbey a few steps inside the old town, founded in the twelfth century by monks who were in fact Irish... medieval Latin called Ireland Scotia. Follow the Ring downhill towards the Danube Canal, where the boulevard finally meets the water.
10. Morzinplatz & Franz-Josefs-Kai

Morzinplatz, 1010 Wien, Austria

The Ring does not close in a circle; it ends at the water. In front of you runs the Danube Canal, a green-grey arm of the river, and along it the Franz-Josefs-Kai, the quay road that completes the loop. In the small park on Morzinplatz stands a dark block of granite with a bronze figure and the words Niemals vergessen... never forget.

The quay was laid out in the same years as the Ring, and the canal front became a fashionable address. In 1873, for the World Exhibition, the Hotel Metropole opened on this square, one of the grandest hotels in Vienna, built for the crowds of visitors the exhibition was supposed to bring. Writers and actors stayed there; for decades it was simply part of the elegant city.

In March 1938, days after the Anschluss, the Gestapo took over the Metropole as its Vienna headquarters. Thousands of people were interrogated and tortured in its rooms: Jews, Social Democrats, Communists, monarchists, Catholic conservatives, anyone who stood in the way. On 1 April 1938 the first transport of Austrian prisoners left Vienna for the Dachau concentration camp; among them was Leopold Figl, who would become chancellor of Austria in 1945. In the last days of the war the hotel burned out, and its ruins were cleared.

The memorial was set up in the 1980s, and its stone came from the granite quarry of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where prisoners were worked to death hauling blocks up the so-called Stairs of Death. On the site of the hotel stands a plain post-war block named the Leopold-Figl-Hof, with a small memorial room inside.

It is the necessary shadow of this walk: the grand boulevard of liberal Vienna, with its banks, theatres and university, led straight into this. Now follow the quay downstream, past Schwedenplatz, and turn right towards the Stubenring, to the last building of the walk, the one that said goodbye to the whole Ringstrasse style.
11. Postsparkasse: Otto Wagner's Postal Savings Bank

Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

Stand on Georg-Coch-Platz and face a facade clad in thin pale marble slabs, studded with hundreds of round metal bolt heads, like a giant strongbox. High on the roof, aluminium angels hold out wreaths, and over the doors a light canopy of glass and metal floats. After an hour of Greek temples and Gothic towers, it feels like a door into the twentieth century... and it was.

This is the Postal Savings Bank, built by Otto Wagner between 1904 and 1906, with a second wing finished in 1912. Wagner had designed historicist buildings himself as a young man. But in 1896 he published a book called Modern Architecture, arguing that a building should show what it is made of and what it is for, instead of wearing the costume of another century.

So, the bolts. Wagner fixed the marble slabs to the wall with bolts capped in aluminium, then a new and expensive material, and historians still argue about how much weight they really carry, since the slabs are also set in mortar. But the statement was the point. Inside, the main banking hall has a glass ceiling, a floor of glass blocks that lets daylight down to the basement, and freestanding aluminium heating vents that look like sculpture.

The bank itself was a modern idea. Founded in 1883 under Georg Coch, it let ordinary people save small sums through the post office and moved money by cheque and transfer instead of cash. Wagner's hall was an office for the masses: light, clean and clear. Across the street, the former War Ministry, finished in 1913 by Ludwig Baumann, answers with columns, a huge double-headed eagle and the statue of Field Marshal Radetzky. Two answers to the same question, facing each other.

That is where the Ringstrasse really ends, not on the map but in ideas. It began with an emperor's decree in 1857 and became a museum of every style in history, and here, a few steps off the boulevard, Wagner showed the way out. The walk ends here; the trams on the Stubenring can carry you round the whole Ring once more.