Augarten

Park · Leopoldstadt (2nd)Vienna,Austria

Vienna's oldest baroque garden layout, its chestnut avenues opened to everyone in 1775 and one of them running straight into a wartime anti-aircraft tower.

The Augarten is the oldest baroque garden layout left in Vienna, and one of its avenues runs straight into a concrete anti-aircraft tower. The court gardener Jean Trehet drew the avenues after 1708, and you walk his pattern today: straight lines of chestnut and lime meeting at two junctions, the Great Star and the Little Star. Late in the war the German air force poured two anti-aircraft towers into the middle of the garden. One of them is over fifty metres high and stands in the line of the main chestnut avenue. Nobody has removed them. Explosives beside the flats that ring the park were judged too dangerous, and both towers became protected monuments in 2000. The rest of the park is in daily use, with school sports grounds, rented vegetable beds along the outer wall, and porcelain still made in the garden's palace. Over the gate is the sentence Joseph II had carved in 1775, the year he opened this imperial garden to everyone: a place of amusement dedicated to all people, from their admirer.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Steer by the towers, not by the gates — Gates pierce the wall on every side and look alike, but only the towers rise above the trees, so they are the one reference that works anywhere inside.
Come once when the leaves are off — In winter the whole baroque pattern reads in a single look down the avenues. In summer the canopies close overhead and you walk in green corridors.
Walk the south-east chestnut avenue near midsummer — It points north-west, exactly where the late-June sun sets, so light runs straight down the corridor with the tower black in it.
Both star junctions have a playground for small children — They are about four hundred metres apart in the northern half of the park, and a bigger playground sits in the trees just south of them.
The towers and the glasshouses stay shut — Both towers are empty and closed, and the old glasshouses and the palm house are working nurseries rather than places to visit. Walking in the park costs nothing.

Things to do

1
Follow the chestnut avenue until concrete stops it
Go in at the Gaußplatz gate in the north-west corner and take the chestnut avenue south-east. For a couple of hundred metres it is a straight green corridor. Then the tower fills the end of it and the path swings aside. You can walk all the way round it, though a fence keeps you off the concrete itself.
2
Read the main gate from both of its faces
Stand under the arch on Obere Augartenstraße. The outer face carries Joseph II's dedication; the inner face records how high the water stood in the flood of 28 February 1830, one metre seventy-five. Then look at the gate lodge on the left, where a tablet of 1934 names the beekeeper Anton Janša.
3
Find the palace where the porcelain is made
Walk into the eastern half of the park and look for the long baroque building behind the trees. Porcelain has been made there by hand since 1923, thrown and painted in the same rooms. The museum inside is open, but the workshops can only be seen on a guided visit.