Hainburg

Hainburg an der Donau is Austria's eastern gate, and looks it: the Danube narrows here between fortified hills, Bratislava's castle is visible downstream, and the town still wears one of Central Europe's most complete medieval armours — two and a half kilometres of walls, towers, and the mighty Wienertor, ranked among the largest surviving medieval town gates in Europe. Richard the Lionheart passed this way into captivity; the Babenbergs and Hungarians contested the crossing for centuries; the town's stones remember it all.

Hainburg's proudest cultural footnote is a small boy with a good voice: Joseph Haydn, sent here from nearby Rohrau at the age of six, received his first musical schooling with his kinsman Frankh — harpsichord, violin and choir-singing — before Vienna claimed him. The father of the symphony learned his notes inside these walls.

Modern Hainburg made history of a gentler kind: the 1984 protests in the riverside forests, when thousands occupied the floodplain to stop a power station, became the founding moment of Austria's environmental movement and led to the Donau-Auen National Park, whose wild waters and white-tailed eagles now begin at the town's edge. The Kulturfabrik, a handsome former imperial tobacco factory on the riverbank, has been reborn as the region's concert and event house — industry, like the town itself, converted to culture.