The Republic of Austria extends over 573 km from west to east and over 298 km from north to south. It has an area of 83 871 km² and, at the time of the population census on 15 May 2001, had a resident population of 8 032 926, and a density of 96 inhabitants per km². By the end of 1993, the population had gone up to over 8 million. The municipalities of Jungholz (Tirol) and the Kleines Walsertal (Vorarlberg) are outside the customs frontier of Austria and belong to the customs area of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The major types of landscape are the gneiss and granite plateaux of the Bohemian Massif in the north, the foothills of the Alps and the Carpathians which lie to the south and south-east of that plateau, the Alps (60% of the area), the Vienna Basin in the north-east and the edge of the Hungarian Plain in the east and south-east. The east and north-east belong to the dry continental Pannonian climate zone. The Alps and the western gneiss and granite plateau form part of the humid-cool to humid-cold Alpine region, with some warmer valleys, and the south-east, along with the larger valleys and the Kärnten Basin, have a dry-continental Illyrian climate. The foothills of the Alps have a climate midway between the southern German and the Pannonian climate zones.
Austria consists of nine Bundesländer, most of which have existed for hundreds of years. Salzburg finally became part of Austria in 1816 and Burgenland in 1921, while Vienna became an independent Bundesland in 1922. The nine Bundesländer are divided into 15 cities with their own charter (Statutarstädte) and 84 political districts. The smallest independent administrative units are the municipalities (Gemeinden), of which there were 2 359 in 2001, including the chartered cities.
