About Graz
The City of Graz
The City of Graz is the second largest city of Austria with an excellent conference venue, the “Messecongress Graz” just a leisurely 15-minute walk from the historic city centre. This high-tech venue regularly hosts major events with up to 16,000 participants. The city offers plenty of hotel rooms of all categories, and an international airport within easy reach from major hubs in Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, Amsterdam, and more. Graz has been awarded the titles of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage since 1999, European Capital of Culture in 2003, Austrian Capital of Culinary Delights since 2008, and UNESCO City of Design since 2011. And within a radius of 200 km, touristic attractions of the Alps-Adriatic region include:
- Charming cities like Vienna, Salzburg, Hallstatt, Bad Ischl, Udine, Trieste, Maribor, Ljubljana, Opatija, Zagreb,
- Natural beauty such as the Dachstein mountain, the Ausseerland-Salzkammergut, the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, South Styria with its wine routes, the summer mountain pastures of the Lipizzaner horses, Lake Bled, the Adriatic Sea, the two steppe lakes Lake Neusiedl and Lake Balaton.
Please also consult the official Graz Tourism website (English) and the official travel guide of the Austrian National Tourist Office.
High-Tech Highlights, Made in Graz/Austria
The heart of research in Europe beats in Austria: Graz and the province of Styria spend more than 5,1% of their regional domestic product on research and development which is more than any other of the 276 regions in Europe invests. So do not put aside the music, cultural and touristic highlights you associate with Austria in your mind, but rather add a strong beacon on your international technology map.
Graz and Southern Austria demonstrate global leadership in automotive engineering and electronic systems with two chip foundries and several thousand engineers. Near-field communication (NFC) payments — created in Graz. Security chips for electronic passports — exclusively designed in Graz, for almost all countries in the world, including the USA. Not to mention MEMS microphones, loudspeakers, and much more. Founded in 2018, Silicon Austria Labs with 500 research scientists and engineers will further boost the region.
And if a traffic accident in a long tunnel is spotted faster using machine learning for distributed acoustic event detection, be sure that these “tunnel ears” come from Graz, too. As one of 80 million international travelers, you may carry Graz in your pocket using a mobile translation app developed here.
Finally, almost 30% of our high-school graduates opt for further education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) areas. Two of these students won a million dollar cheque for the Netflix challenge a few years ago. Others were the first in the world to drive 10,000 km with a single litre of fuel. So the future is fueled right from the heart of Europe!
