Explore Linz

The Hauptplatz is the central square of Linz, laid out around 1230 and measuring 219 by 60 metres, one of the largest enclosed squares in Austria. At its centre stands the Trinity Column, a Baroque plague column made between 1717 and 1723 to a design by Antonio Beduzzi; the Old Town Hall of 1513–14 lines the east side, and the north end leads to the Nibelungen Bridge.

The Old Cathedral is a Baroque church in central Linz, built by the Jesuits from 1669 and consecrated to Ignatius of Loyola in 1678, with plans attributed to Pietro Francesco Carlone. It was the cathedral of the Diocese of Linz from 1785 to 1909, and Anton Bruckner was its organist from 1856 to 1868; two towers with onion domes frame the entrance.

Linz Castle stands on a hill above the old town and the Danube, on the site of the Roman fort of Lentia, and is first recorded in 799. Emperor Frederick III rebuilt it as his residence from 1477; since the 1960s it has housed the Schlossmuseum of the Upper Austrian state museums, extended in 2009 by a new steel-and-glass south wing.

The Lentos Art Museum is the City of Linz's museum of modern and contemporary art, opened in 2003 on the Danube bank between the Nibelungen Bridge and the Brucknerhaus. Designed by the Zurich architects Weber & Hofer, the 130-metre glass-clad building holds a collection built on works from the dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt, among them Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka.

The Ars Electronica Center is a museum of art, science and technology on the Danube bank in Linz-Urfahr, opened in 1996 and rebuilt and enlarged for Linz's year as European Capital of Culture in 2009. Its hands-on exhibitions cover artificial intelligence, robotics, neuroscience and biotechnology, and Deep Space 8K projects images onto a 16-by-9-metre wall and floor.

The New Cathedral, or Mariendom, is a neo-Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral in Linz and Austria's largest church by capacity. Begun in 1862 to plans by the Cologne architect Vincenz Statz, it was consecrated in 1924 and completed in 1935; its 134.6-metre spire stands about two metres lower than that of St. Stephen's in Vienna.

The Pöstlingberg is a 539-metre hill on the left bank of the Danube in Linz, reached from the main square by tram line 50 on the Pöstlingbergbahn mountain railway. On the summit stand the twin-towered Baroque pilgrimage church of the Seven Sorrows of Mary, built from 1742 and made a minor basilica in 1964, a viewing terrace over the city and the Grottenbahn.