Linz Travel Guide

Opened in spring 2013, the Musiktheater am Volksgarten is the opera and ballet home of Linz's Landestheater, designed by British architect Terry Pawson. Its crisp white volumes stand beside the Volksgarten park, forming a modern gateway with the main station and the listed old post office opposite. The main auditorium seats roughly a thousand with acoustics tuned for both opera and musicals, and the resident Bruckner Orchester anchors a season rotating opera, operetta, musical and ballet. With tiered pricing that puts upper-circle seats in the tens of euros, it's a high-value way to sample an evening in this UNESCO City of Media Arts.

Housed in a historic building just off Linz's old town, the Nordico Stadtmuseum is the city's memory in miniature. Its galleries walk you from Roman Lentia artifacts and medieval city models through Linz's uncomfortable chapter as a Nazi 'model city', ending with the exuberant Linzer Torte and carnival mask collections. Multimedia displays and well-chosen objects trace how this Danube town reinvented itself from salt-trading post to steel city and, today, to a UNESCO City of Media Arts.

The OÖ Landesgalerie anchors Linz's OÖ Kulturquartier beside the Danube and next door to the Brucknerhaus. Reopened in 2021 after a major renovation, it now spans a much larger gallery space devoted largely to Austrian art from the 19th century onward — Biedermeier painting, fin-de-siècle masters such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, through to contemporary media installations. Glass atriums pull Danube light deep into the building, making a visit here a fitting expression of Linz's identity as a UNESCO City of Media Arts.

Mauthausen Memorial stands about 20 km east of Linz, on the site of the largest Nazi concentration camp in Austria, opened in August 1938 beside the Wienergraben granite quarry. Prisoners were forced to haul stone up the infamous 'Stairs of Death'; of roughly 200,000 people deported here from across Europe, at least 90,000 perished. A memorial since 1947, the site gained a new visitor centre in 2021. Barracks, the gas chamber and the quarry survive largely intact, making this one of Europe's most complete and sobering places of remembrance.

Standing on the Danube's southern embankment, the Brucknerhaus opened in 1974 and is named after Upper Austria's great composer Anton Bruckner. Designed by Finnish architect Heikki Sirén, its white colonnade cantilevers over the riverside square; the main hall seats roughly 1,400 and enjoys a formidable acoustic reputation. The venue is home to the annual Brucknerfest and a key stage of the Ars Electronica festival, regularly welcoming orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic. At dusk, the concert hall's lights play against the river in one of Linz's signature views.