Green, clean and historic, Graz was, given its urban perfection, a fitting recipient of both the European Capital of Culture title for 2003 and the UNESCO City of Design in 2011. Mid-rise, red-roofed white city blocks snake out from the medieval tangle of Baroque and Renaissance buildings, rising and falling with the verdant undulations of the topography. Trees and forests share the urban grid, rising up to Graz’s Schlossberg, once the site of a strategic medieval fortress, and sliced by the Mur River below. The walkable city is dissected by Europe’s eighth-best biking infrastructure.
The rare blend of aesthetics, relative isolation and warm, sunny microclimate (Graz is one of Austria’s winemaking clusters) has long pulled in mavericks. The city boasts eight universities and much of the population is made up of current and former students who revel in its impressive #42-ranked healthcare system. Many settle here, launching more than 1,400 companies annually according to local boosters, driven by the #40 GDP Per Capita ranking. In 2021, the city also elected Elke Kahr of the Communist Party of Austria as mayor, who seems to be a rising tourist attraction all her own if international media is a metric.