Austria

As a bed of culture and class, Austria remains as one of Europe’s most sophisticated countries, with its old revered cities of Vienna and Salzburg and its quaint countryside charm. Its central European location in the Alps gives it a very mountainous terrain with a total population of 8.02 million people.

The finest tastes of Austria can be found in its Old World romantic cities, especially its capital, Vienna. The great ruling dynasty of the Hapsburgs adorned their seat of power with monument-lined streets, grandiose museums, and inspiring orchestras to lavish their state-of-the-art concert halls. It’s no surprise that Vienna nurtured the musical geniuses of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Mahler, and Brahms.

Most of Vienna’s treasures lie in the inner part of the city, the Innere Stadt, south of the Danube River, along with hotels, restaurants, and bars. Take a tour through the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace, or Schloss Schönbrunn, and get a glimpse of the decadent rooms that the Hapsburgs once inhabited. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is almost the personal repository of all the world treasures and art pieces that the Hapsburgs liked to collect, from Rubens to Raphael to Rembrandt.

Austria’s second most treasured city is Salzburg, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In fact, you can take a tour of Mozart’s Residence, the Mozart-Wohnhaus, where he and his family lived from 1773 to 1787. The house contains several musical instruments, sheet music, and other miscellaneous objects that had once belonged to the great musical genius. For a real breathtaking view of the city, climb up to Festung Hohensalzburg, one of Europe’s largest castles at a 400ft elevation.

For a taste of what the country’s rural side has to offer visitors, you might want to schedule in a trip for the Eisriesenwelt Caves, the world's largest accessible ice caves with over 25 miles of explored passageways. The tour lasts for a little over an hour and takes you through the several immense caverns with all sorts of elaborate ice formations and frozen waterfalls.

But, you can’t go to a country seated in the Alps and not think about doing a little alpine skiing. All sorts of ski resorts can be found throughout central Austria, but one of the best and largest is St. Anton in the Arlberg region, where the slopes can be as intense as the nightlife.