Schönbrunn Palace

Schönbrunn Palace stands in Hietzing, the 13th district of Vienna, south-west of the city centre. The estate began as a hunting ground with a mill and a manor in the 16th century, and Emperor Maximilian II acquired it for the Habsburgs in 1569. The name, meaning beautiful spring, comes from a well found on the site.

From 1688 the architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach drew designs for a new imperial residence on the site. In 1743 Empress Maria Theresa commissioned Nikolaus Pacassi to redesign and extend it, giving it the Rococo interiors seen today. Schönbrunn was the main summer residence of the Habsburgs, and Emperor Franz Joseph was born and died here. UNESCO inscribed the palace and gardens as a World Heritage Site in 1996.

The palace has 1,441 rooms, of which a selection is shown on tours, including the Great Gallery, the Mirror Room where the six-year-old Mozart performed for Maria Theresa, and the apartments of Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth. The formal gardens stretch to the Neptune Fountain and up a hill to the Gloriette, a colonnaded pavilion with a view over the city. The grounds also hold the Palm House, a maze, the Roman Ruin and the Tiergarten Schönbrunn, whose menagerie was built in 1752 and which is regarded as the oldest zoo in the world.

The palace interior is visited with timed tickets. The State Apartments ticket costs €30 for adults (about 40 minutes), and the Palace Ticket, covering the whole piano nobile, costs €42 (about 75 minutes); children aged 6 to 18 pay €20 and €30. The palace opens daily from 8.30 am to 5 pm, and the main gardens, free to enter, from 6.30 am to 5.30 pm. Separate tickets apply for the zoo, the Gloriette terrace, the maze and the Palm House.

Before the Baroque palace, Eleonora Gonzaga added a palace to the Katterburg manor between 1638 and 1643, and the name Schönbrunn first appears on an invoice of 1642. The grounds were a hunting reserve stocked with pheasants, ducks, deer and boar. Today the palace and gardens cover about 160 hectares.

The twentieth century left its marks. American bombers hit the palace in February 1945, and during the Allied occupation from 1945 to 1955 parts of it housed the British delegation and a British garrison. Since 1992 it has been run by a company wholly owned by the Republic of Austria, which pays for its upkeep without state subsidies. The Vienna Philharmonic has played its free Summer Night Concert in the gardens every year since 2004.

In winter, the Winter Pass (€73 for adults) combines the Palace Ticket with the zoo, the Desert Experience House and the Palm House. From 6 November 2026 to 6 January 2027 the Imperial Lights show runs in the gardens in the evening. Palace tickets are for a set time slot, so book online ahead in busy periods.