Schönbrunn Palace

Interesting facts

In 1786 the Orangery hosted an imperial musical duel: Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor and Salieri's Prima la musica e poi le parole were performed at opposite ends of the hall.

The Palm House of 1882 used some 600 tonnes of wrought iron and 120 tonnes of cast iron; it is 111 metres long and glazed with about 45,000 panes.

Among roughly 4,500 plant species in the Palm House is an olive tree about 350 years old, a gift from Spain in 1974.

The Roman Ruin was built from scratch in 1778 as a deliberately crumbling folly and was originally called the Ruin of Carthage.

The Gloriette's inscription gives its date, 1775, in an archaic Roman numeral notation, and its hall later served Franz Joseph as a breakfast room.

The formal parterre was first laid out in 1695 by Jean Trehet, a disciple of Versailles gardener André Le Nôtre.

In the 19th century a hollow west of the palace served as a play area and drill ground where young Habsburg princes trained with a miniature bastion.

American bombs struck the palace in February 1945, shattering most of the Palm House glazing; some plants survived only by being moved to a nearby greenhouse.

The Summer Night Concert in the gardens is free and draws crowds of over 100,000, and it always ends with Johann Strauss II's waltz Wiener Blut.

Why it is worth it

Schönbrunn was the summer residence of the Habsburgs, and it grew from a hunting ground. Emperor Maximilian II bought the floodplain of the Wien river in 1569 and stocked it with game; Eleonora Gonzaga added a palace in the 1640s, and the name, from a "beautiful spring" whose water was drunk at court, first appears in 1642. The palace visitors see today is essentially the one remodelled in the 1740s and 1750s for Empress Maria Theresa, who had received the estate as a wedding gift and turned it into the centre of court life. Its 1,441 rooms make it one of the great Baroque residences of Europe.

History settled deep into these rooms. Franz Joseph, who reigned for 68 years, was born here and died here in November 1916, two years before the monarchy fell. The palace then passed to the Austrian Republic and became a museum; after the Second World War it housed the British element of the Allied administration, and in 1961 it hosted the summit between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Since 1996 the palace and its gardens have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, valued as a complete Baroque ensemble of building, garden and decoration.

The gardens are at least half the visit. From the palace the Great Parterre runs to the Neptune Fountain, and behind it the ground climbs a 60-metre hill to the Gloriette, the arcaded pavilion Maria Theresa built in 1775 to glorify Habsburg power, reusing stone from a demolished Renaissance palace; the view back over the palace to the city is the classic image of Vienna. Along the way lie the Roman Ruin, a deliberately crumbling folly of 1778, a maze, a palm house from 1882 and an orangery. The Tiergarten, founded in 1752 inside the grounds, is the oldest zoo in the world still operating.

Nearly four million people a year make Schönbrunn Vienna's most visited sight. Every summer since 2004 the Vienna Philharmonic has played an open-air Summer Night Concert in the gardens, and evening concerts are held in the palace itself. At the north-western corner of the grounds, look out for Otto Wagner's Hofpavillon, the Art Nouveau station pavilion built for the emperor's private use, which he used only twice.

Getting there

The palace lies in the Hietzing district in the west of Vienna, a little over 1 km from Fünfhaus. Hietzing station on the U4 line of the Vienna U-Bahn stands at the north-western corner of the grounds, with tram and bus connections. Vienna International Airport (VIE) is about 21 km away.

Plan your visit

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