The second-largest opera house in Austria, the Graz Opera brings grand musical theatre to the capital of Styria in a sumptuous building that opened in 1899. Designed by the Viennese theatre architects Fellner and Helmer, who built playhouses across central Europe, it was raised in a richly decorated neo-baroque style to give the prosperous provincial city a stage worthy of the imperial era. Inside, the auditorium glows with gilded plasterwork, painted ceilings, plush seating and tiers of boxes,.....

The largest church in Graz and one of the tallest in Austria, the Herz-Jesu-Kirche, or Church of the Sacred Heart, rises above the Styrian capital with a slender spire reaching almost a hundred metres. Built between 1881 and 1887 in a confident neo-Gothic style, it was raised during a wave of church-building in the late nineteenth century, when growing cities expressed their faith and prosperity in soaring revivalist architecture. The brick church follows the model of the great medieval Gothic .....

Founded in 1811 by Archduke Johann, a reform-minded Habsburg who loved the mountains and people of Styria, the Universalmuseum Joanneum is the oldest public museum in Austria and one of the largest in central Europe. Its central Graz campus, the Joanneumsviertel, gathers several of its collections around a striking sunken plaza in the middle of the old town. The archduke conceived the institution as a place of learning for everyone, donating his own collections of minerals, plants, coins and in.....

A bulbous, biomorphic shape of dark blue acrylic panels, studded with light and sprouting strange nozzles from its skin, the Kunsthaus Graz looks like something that has settled beside the river rather than been built there. Affectionately nicknamed the Friendly Alien by its own architects, it has become the defining emblem of contemporary Graz. The building was created for 2003, when Graz held the title of European Capital of Culture, and designed by the British architects Peter Cook and Colin.....

Some thirty-two thousand weapons, suits of armour, helmets, muskets and pieces of military equipment fill the wooden galleries of the Landeszeughaus in Graz, making it the largest surviving historic armoury in the world. Rank upon rank of polished steel, stacked from floor to ceiling across four storeys, gives an overwhelming impression of a province permanently braced for war. The arsenal was established in the 1640s, when Styria lay on the embattled frontier of Christian Europe and faced repe.....

A wooded hill rising abruptly from the centre of Graz, the Schlossberg is crowned by the remains of a mighty fortress and offers the finest views over the old town and the river below. Its slopes, threaded with paths, tunnels and gardens, have made it the green and historic heart of the Styrian capital and the symbol that locals hold most dear. For centuries the hill carried a powerful citadel that protected the city and famously never fell to a besieging enemy. The fortress was finally pulled .....