How are the crowds in Austria(Vienna and Salzburg in particular) in July?<BR><BR>Are they as bad as places such as Rome and Paris?<BR><BR>Thanks,<BR>David

Large, but not a &quot;showstopper&quot; if you must visit at that time. Starting to get hot in Rome. Nice in Salzburg.

Salzburg gets extremely crowded during its annual Music Festival, which usually starts the last week of July. <BR><BR>Also, Salzburg's historic neighborhood(the &quot;Old Town&quot is a relatively small area, so it seems very crowded even when small groups of tourists are there.<BR><BR>I visited Vienna in July and did not consider it unusually crowded, at least no more so than any large city.

I now live in Vienna and last July was fine as was the August before when I arrived here. Yes quite a lot of tourists - very popular with Japanese (all year round, except January) and lots of Arabs - Hilton Hotel is a bit like Beirut at that time. But other cities in July like Rome, Munich, London are far busier. Last 2 summers here have been very warm (over 30 degrees every day in Aug 2001 except 2). Vienna also has a couple of unique features in my experience which other cities should copy - the river area has a lot of restaurants only opening for summer and a great idea of having some of the best restaurants opening up stalls in front of the Rathaus - eat for 5-10 Euro for food you would normally pay double for (bit bigger portions though), great atmosphere and fantastic choice as licenses get given out to have a whole range of food types. Great icecream here as well.I find it one of the nicest cities in summer, with exception of the distance to the sea and the damned smell of horseshit from all the carriages.

I've been to both in July (first couple of weeks) and concur with Joyce's remarks -- Salzburg is so small and depends on tourism, so it was definitely crowded with tourists in July. Vienna had plenty of tourists, but it's probably not as popular a tourist destination as the others, so perhaps not quite as crowded. I haven't been to Rome in July but Paris plenty of times and Vienna seemed just as crowded in the areas tourists go. That's the part of Paris that is most crowded, too, just around the main big &quot;must sees&quot;. For example, there were very long lines to get into the Hapsburg Palace and the national art museum--I guess maybe not quite as bad as the lines for the Louvre and Orsay museum, though.