The Danube does not actually flow through central Vienna. The river the city grew beside was diverted in the 1870s, when engineers cut a straight artificial channel to end centuries of catastrophic flooding, leaving the old arm behind as the Donaukanal — the narrow, wall-lined waterway that still slices past the First District. Passenger steamers arrived long before the engineers did. The First Danube Steamboat Shipping Company, founded in 1829, became the largest inland shipping concern in the world during the Habsburg era, moving grain, coal and passengers between Vienna and the Black Sea. Its successor still operates from the quay at Franz-Josefs-Kai 2, and the modern best vienna dinner cruise descends directly from that commercial lineage: the same reach of water, a different cargo. Johann Strauss II wrote "An der schönen blauen Donau" in 1867, ten years before the regulated channel opened. The waltz described a river that no longer existed in the form he knew. What a Vienna Danube River cruise tour crosses today is therefore a layered piece of hydro-engineering. The Neue Donau and the 21-kilometre Donauinsel, completed in stages between 1972 and 1988, form a second flood-relief system and the city's largest recreation ground. Between them sit the landmarks the boats pass: Otto Wagner's Schützenhaus of 1908, its blue-and-white majolica tiles designed for a lock that was never fully built; the Urania observatory of 1910; the concrete Ringturm; the twin towers of the Donau City skyline; and Reichsbrücke, whose predecessor collapsed into the water without warning in August 1976. The waltz has proved commercially durable. Evening sailings and best vienna dinner cruise tours pair the score with Viennese cuisine, and the Donaukanal quays below have become an open-air corridor of bars and murals since the 2000s, so the boat now passes a river frontage that is both imperial and improvised. Vienna's UNESCO-listed historic centre ends a few streets from the mooring; the water carries the rest. Understood this way, a best vienna dinner cruise tour is less a novelty than a continuation — one of the few remaining ways to read the city from the surface that made it viable, along an alignment that Roman Vindobona, Habsburg administrators and twentieth-century flood engineers each redrew in turn.