Lainzer Tiergarten

Park · Hietzing (13th)Vienna,Austria

Two and a half thousand hectares of Vienna forest inside a 22-kilometre wall built for imperial hunting, boar crossing the paths in daylight.

The Lainzer Tiergarten is 2,450 hectares of forest that the Habsburgs walled in so only they could hunt it. A stone wall about 2.3 metres high still runs the whole way round, built on Joseph II's order between 1782 and 1787. Timber was never the point here, so the wood was kept thin and open for the hunt, and the oaks were left to stand and spread until their trunks passed four metres round. Two of them have been cored and put at about 430 and 500 years. You walk it on marked paths and nowhere else, and that rule is why the animals ignore you: boar cross the tracks in daylight and roe deer graze the clearings. The last court hunt here was held in 1908, and the gates opened to the public in 1919. Beside the tracks the leaf litter is turned over in long patches where boar have rooted through it. At the middle stands the Hermesvilla, the house Franz Joseph built to keep Elisabeth in Vienna; she came for a few days each May. It is a museum now, open only in the warmer months and only at the end of the week.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come in the first hour after the gates open — Boar and roe deer feed in the open early, and by mid-morning they have pulled back into the thickets away from walkers.
Give a sow with striped piglets the whole path — The stripes mean this year's litter, and mothers defend them hard. Back away the way you came instead of walking past.
The villa opens three days a week and only in summer — Friday to Sunday from May to the end of September, scaffolded since 2025, thirty-seven stairs and no lift inside.
The park itself never closes now — The winter shutdown ended in 2020, and with the leaves down you can see through the wood to the wall itself.
Give the tracks a day or two after heavy rain — The ground here is Flysch, a soft sandstone and clay, so the paths turn to deep mud and dry slowly.
Aim your walk at one of the two forest inns — Rohrhaus and Hirschgstemm sit deep inside with nothing else between them. Hirschgstemm is named for the spot where stags were once fed.

Things to do

1
Climb from the Nikolai gate to the ancient oaks
Enter at the Nikolai gate on the Hütteldorf side and take the steep path up the Johannser Kogel. The oaks at the top are four hundred years and older, with trunks you cannot reach round. Look for standing dead oaks riddled with woodpecker holes, and for the deer fence that shuts off the reserve's core.
2
Walk in to the Hermesvilla and find the gymnastics room
From the Lainzer gate the path runs past a pen of mouflon and back-bred cattle, then a couple of kilometres through the wood to the villa. Inside is Elisabeth's gymnastics room, where she kept rings and a beam. Her bedroom walls were designed by Hans Makart and painted by the young Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch.
3
Take the 122 steps up the Hubertuswarte
The stone tower stands on the Kaltbründlberg, the highest ground inside the wall. A carved relief of Saint Hubertus, the hunters' patron, sits at its foot, although the tower went up in 1937, long after the hunting stopped. From the top the Vienna Woods roll away on every side and the city lies flat to the east.
4
Walk the outside of the wall between its six gates
You can walk the outside of the wall along quiet suburban streets without going in at all. It runs about twenty-two kilometres and the gates break it only six times. Watch for where rough old rubble stonework gives way to patched concrete, and for garden hedges ending against unbroken forest.