Döbling (19th district)

The 19th district (Döbling) is where Vienna stops being a big city. Here are the vineyards that make Vienna the only city of over a million people with significant wine growing within its limits – and the Heurigen (wine taverns) where the wine is served.

The best known is Heuriger Mayer am Pfarrplatz, in the house where Beethoven spent the summer of 1817; just around the corner is the Beethoven Museum on Probusgasse. If you're here in September or October, there's Sturm (partially fermented young wine) fresh from the barrel.

Above the vineyards rises the Kahlenberg with the classic view of Vienna. Much quieter is Setagaya Park, a Japanese garden in the middle of a residential area that hardly anyone knows.

Döbling is also the district with the greatest social contrasts in Vienna: on one side the villa neighborhoods on the hillside, on the other the Karl-Marx-Hof – at over a kilometer long, the best-known Gemeindebau (municipal housing) of Red Vienna and in 1934 the scene of fighting during the February Uprising. The two are less than two kilometers apart.

Getting there: U4 (Heiligenstadt), U6 (Nußdorfer Straße), tram 38 to Grinzing and D to Nussdorf.