Burggarten, Vienna

Burggarten gives you a public park with an unusually royal past: it began as a private garden for Emperor Francis, created after the destruction of Vienna’s fortifications during the Napoleonic occupation. The garden opened to everyone after the monarchy ended, turning former imperial space into an urban retreat. The Palmenhaus is the park’s most distinctive building, a grand glasshouse that replaced an earlier greenhouse around the turn of the twentieth century.

Its structure now combines tropical plants, a butterfly house and a café-restaurant. Its long form runs beside the old Augustinian fortification wall. At the pond, Hercules wrestles with the Nemean Lion.

These figures came from Esterházypark and were installed here after the Second World War. Around the paths, the monuments bring together Mozart, Emperor Francis Joseph and the Augustinian preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara. The lead equestrian monument to Francis is Vienna’s oldest, made in 1781 and brought here with a new stone base. Near Goethegasse, fossilized tree trunks preserve a far older story: they are about 280 million years old and were brought here from the Náchod area of Bohemia when the garden was created.