Schönbrunn Palace
Baroque imperial summer residence and UNESCO World Heritage site with state rooms and a vast formal park.
Schönbrunn grew out of a hunting lodge on the Wien river that Emperor Leopold I had replaced from 1696 with a palace designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. Under Maria Theresa in the 1740s and 1750s, Nicolaus Pacassi reworked the building into a Rococo summer residence for the imperial family, giving it the ochre exterior and the sequence of state rooms seen today. It stayed in Habsburg hands until 1918, when it passed to the new Austrian republic.
Visitors can walk through some forty of the roughly 1,441 rooms, among them the Great Gallery, the lacquered Vieux-Laque Room and the Millions Room lined with Indo-Persian miniatures. The park stretches south to the hill crowned by the Gloriette of 1775 and contains the Neptune Fountain, the Roman Ruin, a palm house and the world's oldest surviving zoo, founded in 1752. Palace and gardens were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996.
Highlights
- UNESCO World Heritage site since 1996, palace and Baroque gardens
- State rooms including the Great Gallery and the Millions Room
- Gloriette of 1775 on the hill above the parterre
- Tiergarten Schönbrunn, the oldest zoo still operating
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