What are the most worthwhile things to do in Vienna on a first visit?

That is the single largest ticket most first-time visitors buy in Vienna, and the included guide material is the reason it works without a tour booking. For a family of two adults and two children in that age bracket, the arithmetic comes to €144.00 before anything else is added, which is worth knowing when you are deciding how many paid sites a week can absorb.

The rest of the obvious list sits inside a designated area. UNESCO inscribed the Historic Centre of Vienna in 2001 under criteria (ii), (iv) and (vi), by Decision 25 COM X.A taken at the Committee's 25th session in Helsinki between 11 and 16 December 2001. The inscribed center is compact and walkable, which is what makes Vienna unusual among European capitals: the designated core is a district you can cross on foot in an afternoon rather than a scatter of sites across a metropolitan area.

The third thing worth building a day around is on a different UNESCO list entirely. The Spanish Riding School's classical horsemanship was added to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2015. The Committee's decision noted that the element could raise awareness of heritage involving human-animal relations, promote cultural diversity and support intercultural dialogue — so what is protected is a living practice with named practitioners, not a building you tour.

Criterion (vi), one of the three behind Vienna's inscription, is the associative criterion — the one that recognizes a place for what it is connected to rather than what stands in it. For Vienna that means the designated center is listed partly for its role in European musical history, which reframes the obvious itinerary: the concert halls and the streets between them are part of the property, not a distraction from it.

• Day one — Schönbrunn, with the audio guide that comes with the €42.00 adult ticket; it is on the city's western edge and takes a half-day minimum.
• Day two — The inscribed Historic Centre on foot, which is small enough to cross without transport.
• Day three — The Spanish Riding School, where what you are seeing is the intangible element inscribed in 2015 rather than the architecture around it.

US citizens need no visa for stays of up to 90 days within any 180-day period, but the State Department notes that Austria requires two blank passport pages for the entry stamp — a small requirement that stops a trip at the desk if a passport is full. Schönbrunn's ticket prices are published as subject to seasonal change, so the €42.00 adult rate should be confirmed against your own dates. And the Spanish Riding School's tradition is a performance practice with a schedule, which means it cannot simply be dropped into an itinerary on the day.

The Vienna timing answer covers the palace's hours and the 45-minute last-admission rule; the Vienna food and drink question takes up the city's Alpine water supply and its spring produce.