Graz · Ratgeber
Graz on foot: more than 1,200 places on one map
Most city maps for travellers show twenty sights and a handful of restaurants. That is a selection, and a selection only answers the question its author asked himself.
The hotels on the map
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What these numbers cannot know: Experience Nobody from this project has stayed at these hotels. Quiet Estimated from location, not measured. Walking time Crow-fly × 1.3 ÷ 4.5 km/h — not routed. Coordinates Geocoded to the street address. Source data OpenStreetMap is incomplete.
Side by side
Up to three — same scale, same baseline
Every house in the guide, plus every recorded place inside the walking radius you set. The slider above changes both at once: the circle drawn on the map, and what the filters take “nearby” to mean. The slider sets the walking time, the chips filter by what lies within it; click a hotel to see its surroundings. Circle = crow-fly × 1.3, not a routed isochrone.
Our map does something else: it shows 1,249 places from OpenStreetMap for the city of Graz and lets the reader set the radius. Not “what is worth seeing”, but “what lies within twelve minutes’ walk of this house”.
What is on the map
| Category | Number |
|---|---|
| Restaurants | 294 |
| Cafés | 197 |
| Parks and green spaces | 156 |
| Pubs and bars | 118 |
| Supermarkets | 84 |
| Sights, museums, galleries | 66 |
| Tram stops | 61 |
Close to six hundred of these places carry opening hours, more than six hundred an address, close to three hundred a note on the cooking and more than two hundred an outdoor area. Hover over a point and it shows what actually stands in the data — and only that. Where OpenStreetMap has no entry, the line stays empty instead of us inventing one.
How the walking radius works
Click a house and a circle is drawn. The slider sets the walking time from three to twenty minutes; below that setting, intermediate rings are drawn at five-minute intervals, so that you can see where the five and the ten lie inside the big circle.
Everything inside the circle is counted by category. That is the real use of it: you are not comparing hotel descriptions but surroundings. And the differences are bigger than you would expect — between two houses in the same district there can be a couple of hundred places to eat and drink.
Important: the walking time is an estimate — straight-line distance times 1.3 at 4.5 km/h, not routed. The model knows nothing of bridges (which matter at the Mur), nothing of metres of climb (which matter on the Schlossberg, the castle hill above the old town) and nothing of traffic lights. Reckon on ±2 to 3 minutes, and on the hill considerably more.
The places that are on no postcard
Search for “Graz insider tips” and you mostly get the same five suggestions. The ones below are in our data, demonstrably there, and still hardly ever on a list:
In the old town, where everyone walks past:
- Doppelwendeltreppe in the Burg — two stone staircases screwed into one another, meeting on every landing and parting again. Freely accessible, in a courtyard, with no sign in front of it.
- esc medien kunst labor (Bürgergasse 5) and Galerie Eugen Lendl (Bürgergasse 4) — two doors side by side in a lane most people enter for the sake of the cathedral.
- Werkstadt Graz (Sporgasse 16) — in the middle of the most photographed lane in the city.
Museums for one particular interest:
- Museum der Wahrnehmung (Friedrichgasse 41) — the psychology of perception, to try out for yourself.
- Schell Collection (Wiener Straße 10) — locks and keys, in the district of Lend.
- Hans Gross Kriminalmuseum (Heinrichstraße 18) — the university’s criminological collection, in Geidorf.
- ToyToyToy Spielzeugmuseum (Hartiggasse 4).
- Montan- und Werksbahnmuseum at the northern foot of the Schlossberg.
Contemporary art away from the Kunsthaus:
- rotor (Volksgartenstraße 6a) and Querort (Quergasse 3a) in Lend.
- Grazer Kunstverein (Burggasse 4) and Halle für Kunst Steiermark (Burgring 2) on the edge of the Stadtpark.
- off_gallery (Griesgasse 31) and raum (Griesgasse 26) in Gries.
Green that is not called Stadtpark:
- Leechpark and Meranpark in Geidorf, and the Botanischer Garten der Universität.
- Rösselmühlpark and Oeverseepark in Gries — the green patches in the densest residential quarter.
- Metahofpark in Lend, Augarten on the Mur in the south.
Of the more than a hundred and fifty green spaces recorded, most are small and none of them is a sight. But put them inside the walking radius around your hotel and they are exactly what makes a stay pleasant.
What the map does not know
We write it alongside on every view, and here once more at length:
- “Quiet” is estimated, not measured. There is no freely usable noise data for Graz. We estimate it from the distance to the nearest main road and the density of places around it. The word “estimated” always stands alongside in the interface.
- Walking times are straight lines, not routes.
- Some of the hotel coordinates are street estimates, not geocoded.
- Prices are researched guide values, not live rates.
- OpenStreetMap is incomplete. If a place is missing there, it is missing here as well. The dataset is good enough for a statement about density and too imprecise for a ranking.
- The map knows nothing of the season. Christkindlmärkte, the Christmas markets, along with summer stages and pop-ups, are not in it.
Place data © OpenStreetMap contributors
The data comes from OpenStreetMap and is published under the Open Database License (ODbL). It was retrieved once via Overpass and is served as a static file — at runtime the map asks nothing of any third party. The attribution stands in the footer of every view of the map and stays there.
Why the data is retrieved only once
An obvious objection: why not query it live, and have the data always current? Three reasons, and all three are decisions rather than conveniences.
First, the terms of use. The public Overpass instances are meant for queries, not as a back end for other people’s websites. One call per page view would be an abuse of the infrastructure.
Second, the loading time. A static extract is served with the page; a live query would slow every page down to the response time of somebody else’s server.
Third, data protection. Before you consent to the map service, building the map makes not one single request to a third party. That property would be lost the moment the data were fetched live. Decline consent and you still get a complete picture of the surroundings — only without the tile image.
The price for it: the data freezes at the moment it was retrieved. We hold that to be the better bargain, because the map makes a statement about density rather than giving a day-to-day answer — one place more or less changes nothing about a radius holding a hundred entries.
How to use it
Best used not as a sightseeing list but as a decision aid before booking: pick a house, set the slider to the walk you are willing to make in the evening, and look at what is left. The results come pre-filtered on the district pages Lend & Gries, Innere Stadt and Jakomini & Geidorf; the overall comparison is under Where to stay in Graz.
For the classic route through the city there is still the walking tour: The Graz old town on foot and the Schlossberg comparison. And for everything to do with eating, the breakdown by district under Eating out in Graz.