Klagenfurt am Wörthersee is the capital of the federal state of Carinthia in Austria. With a population of over 90,000, it is the sixth-largest city in the country. The city is the bishop’s seat of the Roman Catholic diocese of Gurk-Klagenfurt and home to the Alpen-Adria University.
The city of Klagenfurt is located in southern Austria, midway across the nation, near the international border. It rests in the middle region, almost as far from Innsbruck, to the west, as from Vienna, to the northeast. It is on the lake Wörthersee and on the Glan River. The city is surrounded by several forest-covered hills and mountains with heights of up to 1,000 m (3,300 ft), for example, Ulrichsberg. To the south is the Karawanken mountain range, which separates Carinthia from Slovenia and Italy.
There is a civic theatre-cum-opera house with professional companies, a professional symphony orchestra, a state conservatory and concert hall; there are musical societies such as Musikverein (founded in 1826) or Mozartgemeinde, a private experimental theatre company, the State Museum, a modern art museum and the Diocesan museum of religious art; the Artists’ House, two municipal and several private galleries, a planetarium in Europa Park, literary institutions such as the Robert Musil House, and a reputable German-literature competition awarding the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.
Klagenfurt is a popular vacation spot with mountains both to the south and north, numerous parks and a series of 23 stately homes and castles on its outskirts. In summer the city is home to the Altstadtzauber (The Magic of the Old City) festival. Also located here are the University of Klagenfurt, a campus of the Fachhochschule Kärnten, Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, a college of education for primary and secondary teacher training and further education of teachers as well as a college of general further education (VHS) and two institutions of further professional and vocational education (WIFI and BFI). Among other Austrian educational institutions, there is a Slovene language Gymnasium (established in 1957) and a Slovene language commercial high school. Several Carinthian Slovene cultural and political associations are also based in the city, including the Hermagoras Society, the oldest Slovene publishing house founded in Klagenfurt in 1851. In addition to cultural attractions and activities available in and around Klagenfurt, this city has one more important attribute that must be mentioned. Klagenfurt is in a central location for many other great European destinations. Klagenfurt is less than an hour’s drive from Italy and Slovenia, and only a few hours from Vienna, Salzburg, Budapest, Bratislava, and Zagreb.
