Linz

Linz is a city and Statutarstadt in northeast Austria, on the Danube river. It is the capital of the state Upper Austria (Oberösterreich).

The city was founded by the Romans, who called it Lentia.

The city was most of the times only a provincial and local government city of the Holy Roman Empire and an important waypoint between several trade routes, spanning the river Danube from the west to the east and Czechoslovakia and Poland from north to the Balkans and Italy to the south.

During World War II, Linz became a major industrial area, manufacturing chemicals and steel for the Nazi war machine. Many of these factories had been dismantled in the newly acquired Czechoslovakia, and reassembled in Linz. After the war, the river Danube that runs through the eastern most portion of Linz, separating the Urfahr district in the north from the rest of Linz, served as the border between the American and Russian occupation troops.

The Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex, the last Nazi concentration camp to close, is located mostly around Linz, with the main camp in Mauthausen just 30 kilometres away.

Linz today is still an industrial city. The VOEST ALPINE a large steel mill (Founded as "Hermann Göring Werke" during WWII, famous for the LD- ("Linz-Donawitz") procedure for the production of steel) and the former "Chemie Linz" a chemical group, now split up in several companies, made Linz to one of Austria's most important economical centers. Linz is also home of the famous PEZ dispensers of peppermint candy.

Ars Electronica Center on the north bank of the Danube (in the Urfahr district), across from the Hauptplatz (main square), which leads to the historical part of the city (Altstadt), is home to one of the few public 3D CAVEs in Europe (the very first 3D CAVE world-wide that was publicly accessible) and attracts a large gathering of technologically oriented artists every year for the Ars Electronica Festival.