Schönbrunn Palace & Gardens

Palace · Hietzing (13th)Vienna, Austria

Schönbrunn has 1,441 rooms and shows about forty of them. It was built as the Habsburgs' summer residence on the edge of the city, and its walls carry the ochre-gold shade that Austrians now simply call Schönbrunn yellow. Maria Theresa gave the palace most of its present character; she bore sixteen children and ran an empire at the same time. A six-year-old Mozart played for her in these rooms in 1762. The rooms open to visitors range from small lacquered chambers to enormous frescoed halls. The palace stopped being a seat of power in November 1918, when the last Habsburg emperor signed away his part in government under this roof, and it has been a museum ever since. The gardens are the part locals actually use. A long gravel alley climbs behind the palace to the Gloriette, a colonnade built on the ridge purely as a garden ornament and a viewpoint. From it the whole yellow front lies below with the city behind. Off the axis are a false Roman ruin, a hedge maze, a palm house and the world's oldest zoo, still arranged around its Baroque pavilions.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The garden opens long before the palace — the park gates open at half past six, and the alley up to the Gloriette is nearly empty at an hour when the courtyard queue is already forming.
The two fronts light at opposite ends of the day — the garden front faces roughly south-south-west and holds sun into the late afternoon; the entrance courtyard behind it takes the morning.
Walk up to the colonnade — the ground in front of the Gloriette already gives you the axis of palace, parterre and city, before you decide whether to climb any higher.

Things to do

1
Walk the axis to the Gloriette
Start at the parterre behind the palace and go straight up the long gravel alley. It is about twenty minutes uphill and the palace behind you gets smaller and more legible with every hundred metres, until from the colonnade the whole thing sits in its garden like a plan drawing.
2
Find the fake ruin
Off to one side of the park stands a collapsed Roman arch with a pool at its foot, built deliberately half-ruined in 1778 because ruins were fashionable. It is convincing enough that people photograph it as ancient, which was more or less the intention.
3
Step the length of the palm house
The glasshouse on the west side of the park is 111 metres of iron and glass, opened in 1882 and split into three sections held at three temperatures — cold at one end, tropical at the other, temperate in the tall middle where the palms have room to reach the roof. Walking it end to end takes ten minutes and the air changes twice under the same span of glass.
4
Stand in the middle of the oldest zoo
The menagerie behind the palace still has its 1752 plan: thirteen enclosures arranged in a ring around a central octagonal pavilion, where Franz Stephan took breakfast with his animals in view on every side. The modern zoo has grown outwards around that circle, but walk into the middle of it and you are standing in the emperor's breakfast room.