Why Austria is three countries in one outline

What shape the country is

Austria covers 83,879 square kilometres and is landlocked, and its outline is often described as pear-shaped. The westernmost third is a narrow corridor between Germany and Italy, between 32 and 60 kilometres wide, and the rest of the country lies to the east with a maximum north to south width of 280 kilometres. The whole measures almost 600 kilometres in length, extending eastward from Lake Constance.

That shape has consequences no map of area conveys. A country 600 kilometres long and 32 kilometres wide at one end is effectively two different places joined by a corridor, and the drive from Vorarlberg in the far west to Burgenland in the east crosses several distinct terrains and economies.

The eight land borders follow from the same geometry. Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland and Liechtenstein all touch a country whose long axis runs across the centre of Europe, and Austria's history as a corridor and a frontier is a direct consequence.

What the three regions are

Austria divides into three unequal geographical areas, and almost everything about the country follows from which of them a place is in.

The largest is the Alps, which occupy 62% of the territory. These are geologically young mountains, steep and high, and they run the length of the west and centre of the country. They hold the high peaks, the glaciers, the winter sport economy and the least of the population.

In the east the mountains give way to a part of the Pannonian plain, the great lowland basin that extends across Hungary. This is flat, warm and dry by Austrian standards, and it holds Vienna and most of the people, along with the agriculture and the wine country.

North of the Danube lies the Bohemian Forest, a granite massif that is older and lower than the Alps and covers the remaining 10% of the country. It is a low mountain range with bare, windswept plateaus and a harsh climate, and the Manhartsberg, a granite ridge, separates the Waldviertel from the Weinviertel within it.

Three regions of that description in one small country produce a variety that a state of this size has no right to, and it is the reason a national generalisation about Austrian weather or settlement is almost always wrong somewhere.

What the rock is doing underneath

The Alps are geologically young, which is the single most important fact about the Austrian landscape and the reason it looks the way it does. Young mountains are steep and still rising, they have not been worn down into rounded uplands, and they generate the rock falls and the unstable slopes that Alpine settlement has to be designed around.

The three regions of the country are three different geological stories rather than three parts of one. The Alps were thrown up by the collision between the African and European plates and are still being deformed by it. The Pannonian basin in the east is a subsiding basin filled with sediment. The Bohemian massif north of the Danube is granite, far older than either, and it is the worn stump of a mountain range that existed before the Alps began.

The Northern Limestone Alps and the Southern Limestone Alps are made of sedimentary rock laid down in a sea, and the Central Eastern Alps that carry the highest peaks are crystalline. That difference is visible from a distance: limestone gives pale cliffs and caves, and crystalline rock gives the glaciated high peaks and the rounded high ridges.

Those marine deposits also left salt in the mountains around the Salzkammergut. It has been mined there since prehistory, the wealth it produced named Salzburg and paid for a good deal of what the region contains, and the mining region is on the World Heritage List for exactly that continuity.

Where the ice left its mark

Glaciation shaped everything above the valley floors and a good deal below them. The U-shaped valleys, the lakes strung along them, the hanging side valleys with waterfalls at their mouths and the moraine ridges across the lowland margins are all products of ice sheets that repeatedly advanced out of the Alps and retreated.

The Salzkammergut lakes are the clearest case. Deep, narrow and lying in rock basins gouged by glaciers, they are a different kind of lake from the shallow warm bathing lakes of Carinthia and from the steppe lake in the east, and the difference is entirely a matter of how each was made.

Glaciers remain in the high Central Eastern Alps and are retreating measurably, which is a change with practical consequences beyond the scenery. Alpine glaciers store water and release it through the summer, so their retreat alters the flow of the rivers that feed Austrian hydropower, and hydropower is the reason over three quarters of the country's electricity is renewable.

The permafrost in the high rock is the other quiet change. Ground that has been frozen for millennia holds mountain faces together, and thawing destabilises them, which shows up as rock falls onto paths, cable car stations and huts built when the ground was reliably solid.

Where the water goes

The Danube is the organising river and it crosses the country from west to east, entering from Germany and leaving into Slovakia. It is the only major European river to run in that direction, and the valley it cuts is the corridor along which the population, the agriculture, the road and rail routes and most of the history are arranged.

The Alpine rivers divide at a watershed running through the mountains. North of it the Inn in Tyrol, the Salzach in Salzburg and the Enns in Styria and Upper Austria flow north as direct tributaries of the Danube. South of it in central and eastern Austria the Gail and the Drau in Carinthia flow the other way, into the Drava and eventually the Black Sea by a different route.

That watershed is a cultural boundary as much as a hydrological one. Valleys that drain north look towards the Danube and Vienna, valleys that drain south look towards Carinthia, Slovenia and Italy, and the dialects and the historical allegiances follow the water.

Lakes are the third element and they cluster in two places. The Salzkammergut in the north holds a set of deep glacial lakes among mountains, and Carinthia in the south holds shallower, warmer bathing lakes. The Neusiedler See in the far east is different from both: a shallow steppe lake with reed beds, on the Hungarian border, of a kind found nowhere else in central Europe.

What the climate does across the country

The climate is not one climate. The western Alpine third is Alpine, with heavy precipitation, long snow cover at altitude and short summers on the high ground. The eastern lowlands are continental in the Pannonian sense, with hot dry summers and considerably less rain. The Bohemian Forest in the north is described as harsh, with bare windswept plateaus.

Altitude does more work than latitude across a country only 280 kilometres deep. A valley floor and the ridge above it are two different climates a thousand metres apart, and the vegetation, the farming and the settlement pattern change accordingly over distances a walker covers in a morning.

The practical consequence is that snow cover is reliable in the west at altitude and unreliable low down, and that the eastern wine regions and the western ski resorts occupy the same country under conditions that have almost nothing in common.

Warming is changing the balance in the way it is across the Alps. Snow lines rise, glaciers retreat, and the low and mid-altitude parts of the winter economy face a problem the high resorts do not, which is a geographical fact with direct economic content in a country where tourism is around a tenth of output.

How the mountains are arranged

The Alps in Austria run in parallel chains rather than as a single mass. The Northern Limestone Alps form the boundary with Germany, the Central Eastern Alps carry the highest peaks and the glaciers, and the Southern Limestone Alps run along the Italian and Slovenian frontier.

The Grossglockner, at 3,798 metres, is the highest point and sits in the Central Eastern Alps in the Hohe Tauern, which is the largest area of high mountain in the country and now the largest national park in the Alps.

The passes between the chains determined where everything went. Alpine transport in Austria runs through a small number of routes, north to south across the ranges and east to west along the valleys, and towns, castles, tolls and eventually railways all located themselves at those points. The Brenner, the lowest of the major crossings, has been the main route between northern Europe and Italy since the Romans used it.

The engineering that opened those routes is part of the heritage rather than only the infrastructure. The Semmering Railway, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1998, was built to cross a mountain barrier with nineteenth-century technology and still carries scheduled trains.

What the land is used for

Farming is concentrated in the east and in the valleys, because those are the only places that have both the flat ground and the growing season for it. The Pannonian lowlands carry arable farming and the wine regions of Lower Austria and Burgenland, and the Danube valley carries orchards and the terraced vineyards of the Wachau.

The Alpine provinces farm differently and for different reasons. Mountain agriculture is dairy and livestock on ground too steep and too high for anything else, and it is maintained partly because it keeps the landscape that the tourism industry sells and the slopes stable. A meadow mown twice a year is a different hillside from one left to scrub, and the payments that keep the mowing happening are a landscape policy as much as an agricultural one.

Forest covers a large share of the country and rises with the terrain, and it is worked rather than left. Timber is a real industry, forest management is regulated in detail, and the protective function of woodland above villages, holding soil and slowing avalanches, is treated as infrastructure rather than as an amenity.

The rest is rock, ice and settlement. Austria's usable land is a smaller fraction of its area than the map suggests, its population is therefore concentrated in the eastern quarter and the valley floors, and the density figures for the country as a whole describe a distribution that does not exist anywhere in it. Vienna holds close to a quarter of the population on a fraction of a per cent of the territory, and several Alpine districts hold fewer than twenty people per square kilometre. Austria: travel works through the parts a visitor reaches and Austria: economy what the land produces.