Austria is an array of picture postcard villages, plentiful snow, chic and cheerful après ski, championship slopes and a huge range of venues A favoured first choice for families, several resorts like Niederau, are brilliant for beginners. Others - Soll, Kitzbühel and Saalbach - are ideal for keen intermediates. And the world-renowned St. Anton tops a choice of challenging areas for the advanced skier.

Nightlife is versatile with a choice of  laid-back taverns, beer gardens and excellent apres-ski, as well as trendy clubs and dance venues packed to the small hours. Click to continue

Salzburg

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Tirol

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Other areas

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The amazing snowcapped mountains of regions like the Tyrol that provide the most familiar images of Austria - a landscape of jagged peaks and rampaging rivers, giving way to green pastures studded with onion-domed churches. Yet Austria is by no means all alpine vistas - the country stretches across central Europe for some 700km, from the shores of the Bodensee in the west to the edge of the flat Hungarian plain in the east.

Throughout this beautiful country are spectacular architectural reminders of the once-powerful Hapsburgs, who dominated central Europe for seven centuries. Nowhere is the legacy more evident than in the capital, Vienna. If you like cities that have a theatrical flourish then they don't come with more flourish than Vienna. This isn't a city that goes in for hiding its good looks.

Being in Vienna can be like being on a film set on at times. Velvet-clad bewigged characters are everywhere - from selling tickets to concerts to playing music in the open air - while bowler hated, waist-coated coachmen flash past driving gleaming horse drawn carriages.

Vienna has a well deserved reputation for music, mostly classical and popular classical but pop and rock figure too. Hardly a day goes by without you being able to enjoy those familiar hand clapping and foot tapping marches, polkas and waltzes in a grand location or outdoors.

There are its Baroque Palaces to visit, elegant coffee houses serving the famous chocolate cake sachertorte and more parks than any other European capital. In 2001 the city opened the new museums quarter - more like a museum complex - and UNESCO declared Vienna a world heritage site.

Vienna's districts are laid out in a series of ever widening rings with much of the centre being pedestrianised. If you're taking a short break you probably won't need to venture much beyond the central district called the Innere Stadt.

Austria's other cities are similarly infused with a historical magic espeially Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart, with stunning Baroque churches set before a backdrop of snow-covered peaks, and Innsbruck, in the centre of the Austrian Alps.

 Salzburg is  intoxicating. Its Altstadt contains the country's most concentrated ensemble of Baroque architecture, and the Hohensalzburg fortress is arguably the country's most impressive medieval castle .Austria forms one of Europe's most mountainous countries, yet an excellent network of transport links puts even the dizziest of heights within reach. Key summer hiking areas are the alpine regions of western Austria, stretching from northeastern Styria and eastern Carinthia through the Salzkammergut, Salzburger Land, Tyrol and Vorarlberg.