Bohemia and Austria: From Prague to Vienna
When to go
May to June and September to October. In July and August Prague and Hallstatt are packed, and day-trip coaches fill the lakeside village from mid-morning. From late November to Christmas the markets of Prague and Vienna are lit, but the days are short and the Salzkammergut can have snow. In autumn the vineyards of the Wachau turn gold and the wine taverns open.
The stops
Interactive map of the route on our site ›
- Prague3 nights
The astronomical clock on the Old Town Hall, first set going in 1410, still parades its apostles every hour. In the Jewish Quarter, Josefov, the Old-New Synagogue of the thirteenth century is the oldest active synagogue in Europe, and the Old Jewish Cemetery beside it holds the grave of Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal, whom legend credits with the Golem; the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue carry the names of some 78,000 Jews of Bohemia and Moravia murdered in the Holocaust.
- Kutná Hora and the Sedlec Ossuarystop on the way
In the Middle Ages the silver mines of Kutná Hora made it the richest town in Bohemia after Prague, and the Prague groschen was minted here. In the suburb of Sedlec, a small chapel is decorated with the bones of tens of thousands of people, arranged in 1870 by a woodcarver, František Rint, into a chandelier and a coat of arms.
- Konopiště Castlestop on the way
The castle that Archduke Franz Ferdinand bought in 1887 and made his home, until his murder in Sarajevo in 1914 set off the First World War. He was an obsessive hunter, and its corridors are hung with thousands of his trophies.
- Taborone night
Founded in 1420 by the radical Hussites, who named it after Mount Tabor in Galilee. Under the old town runs a maze of cellars and tunnels dug for storage and refuge, part of which can be walked, and a statue of the one-eyed Hussite general Jan Žižka stands on the main square.
- Hluboká Castlestop on the way
The Schwarzenberg family rebuilt their castle in the nineteenth century as a white Tudor Gothic palace, on the model of Windsor Castle. The rooms inside are panelled in carved wood, and the park runs down to the Vltava.
- České Budějovicestop on the way
A royal town founded in 1265, built around a square of arcades among the largest in Central Europe, with the Samson fountain in the middle. Its German name, Budweis, gave the Budvar brewery its beer, and a long court battle with the American brewer over the name Budweiser.
- Cesky Krumlov2 nights
A town of red roofs inside a double loop of the Vltava, under a castle that is the second largest castle complex in Czechia, after Prague Castle. Its Baroque theatre still has its original stage machinery and scenery, among the very few in the world to survive; the town has been a World Heritage site since 1992.
- Linzstop on the way
The capital of Upper Austria, on the Danube. Johannes Kepler lived here for fourteen years and published his Harmonices Mundi, with the third law of planetary motion, in 1619. Some twenty kilometres down the river is Mauthausen, the concentration camp where some ninety thousand people were murdered, now a memorial site.
- Gmundenone night
A lake town at the north end of the Traunsee, the deepest lake in Austria, known for the pottery with green flame patterns made here for centuries. Schloss Ort stands on a rock in the lake, joined to the shore by a long wooden bridge.
- Kaiservilla, Bad Ischlstop on the way
The summer house of Emperor Franz Joseph, who spent his summers here for some sixty years. At the desk in his study, on 28 July 1914, he signed the declaration of war on Serbia that began the First World War.
- Hallstattone night
Salt has been mined in the mountain above the village for some seven thousand years, and Hallstatt gave its name to a whole culture of the early Iron Age in Europe. There is so little ground between the lake and the cliff that the bones from the churchyard were moved to the Bone House, where hundreds of skulls are painted with names and flowers. In China a copy of the village was built in 2012.
- Altaussee Salt Minestop on the way
A salt mine still worked deep inside the mountain. In the last years of the war the Nazis hid thousands of looted works of art in its galleries, among them the Ghent Altarpiece and Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges; in 1945 local miners and the Allied “Monuments Men” saved them from being blown up.
- Admontone night
A Benedictine abbey at the gateway to the Gesäuse gorge, founded in 1074. Its Baroque library hall, finished in 1776, is some seventy metres long and is the largest monastery library in the world.
- Melk Abbeystop on the way
Benedictine monks have lived on this rock over the Danube since 1089; the yellow Baroque abbey was rebuilt from 1702 to designs by Jakob Prandtauer, with a library of painted ceilings. Umberto Eco named the young narrator of The Name of the Rose Adso of Melk.
- Durnsteinone night
The Wachau, the stretch of the Danube between Melk and Krems, is a World Heritage landscape of vineyards, apricot orchards and wine villages. In the castle above Dürnstein, now a ruin, Duke Leopold V held Richard the Lionheart prisoner in 1192 on his way home from the Crusade.
- Kremsstop on the way
One of the oldest towns in Austria, first recorded in 995, at the eastern end of the Wachau. It is entered through the Steiner Tor, a gate of 1480, and its old streets climb between wine cellars.
- Klosterneuburg Abbeystop on the way
An Augustinian abbey on the Danube just above Vienna, founded in 1114 by Margrave Leopold III, later the patron saint of Austria. Its treasure is the Verdun Altar, finished in 1181 by Nicholas of Verdun: fifty-one enamel plates in gold and blue.
- Vienna2 nights
The Stadttempel, inaugurated in 1826, was the only one of Vienna’s synagogues to survive Kristallnacht, because the law of the time required it to be hidden behind the façade of an apartment block. On Judenplatz, Rachel Whiteread’s memorial to the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust is a library cast in concrete with its books turned inward; Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19 is a museum.
What it costs
Eighty dollars a night is the room. The car, the fuel and the tolls are yours: both Czechia and Austria charge for their motorways with a vignette, an electronic one in Czechia and a sticker or digital one in Austria, and each country needs its own. A Czech rental car usually comes with the Czech vignette; the Austrian one is yours. Parking in central Prague and Vienna is paid by zone and expensive, and if you pick up the car in Prague and return it in Vienna, the rental company adds a one-way fee for the border.
What to know
Three things. One: the Czech vignette. Every motorway in Czechia needs an electronic vignette tied to the number plate, bought online or at a petrol station; there is no sticker, and cameras read the plates. Check with the rental company that the car has one. Two: the Austrian vignette. Austria checks it the same way, and the fine is steep; buy it before you cross. A digital vignette bought online by a private person only becomes valid on the eighteenth day after purchase, because of the consumer’s right to cancel, so for this trip buy a sticker or a digital vignette at a petrol station on the Czech side of the border, which is valid at once. Three: Hallstatt. The village is closed to visitors’ cars; you park in the car parks at the entrance to the village, which are paid and fill early, and walk in. If your hotel is in the village, ask it ahead for a pass to drive to the door with your bags.
Roads, tolls and rules
Both countries drive on the right. In Czechia dipped headlights must be on day and night all year, and the limit for alcohol is zero: not one beer before you drive. From Český Krumlov the road crosses into Austria toward Linz and then runs on country roads into the Salzkammergut and east to the Enns valley; the last two days follow the Danube, and the Wachau is a slow road on the riverbank between vineyards. No day is longer than about a hundred and sixty kilometres, and several are much shorter, so there is time to stop.
Travel Bohemia and Austria: From Prague to Vienna
The route on our site, with a room up to $80 every night.