🇦🇹 Austria · Vienna and the East (Lower Austria)
If Vienna was the capital of the Habsburgs, Schönbrunn was their summer paradise. On the edge of the city, this immense baroque residence with its imperial yellow façade — the distinctive 'Schönbrunn yellow' — was conceived as the Austrian answer to Versailles: a palace surrounded by geometric gardens, fountains, mythological sculptures and avenues of clipped trees, crowned at the top of the hill by the elegant Gloriette. This is where the Viennese court spent the warm months, where a child Mozart played before Empress Maria Theresa and where much of the long life of Emperor Franz Joseph I unfolded.
Visiting Schönbrunn means stepping right into the world of the Habsburgs. The tour of the imperial apartments shows the salons where Maria Theresa governed, Franz Joseph's austere study, the rooms of the legendary Empress Sisi and the state rooms where the great ceremonies were held. Outside, the gardens invite you to get lost: walk up to the Gloriette for the best panoramic view of Vienna, wander the maze, take a look at the fake Roman ruins or visit the Tiergarten, the oldest zoo in the world still in operation.
This guide brings together the practical side of making the most of Schönbrunn: which ticket suits you, how to get there from central Vienna, what to see inside and outside the palace, and how to organise your visit to avoid the crowds. It is, without a doubt, one of the unmissable visits on any trip to Austria, and the best way to understand the splendour and the daily life of the dynasty that reigned over half of Europe for more than six centuries.
The origin of Schönbrunn goes back to a hunting lodge that stood on this land and was destroyed during the Ottoman siege of 1683. At the end of the 17th century, Emperor Leopold I commissioned the architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach to design a grand new imperial palace; the name 'Schönbrunn' ('beautiful spring') comes from a spring found in the area. But it was Empress Maria Theresa, in the 18th century, who turned Schönbrunn into what we know today: she extended and redecorated it in rococo style, making it the heart of Habsburg court life and their favourite summer residence. It was here, in 1762, that a six-year-old Mozart played before the empress. Schönbrunn witnessed key moments in European history: Napoleon stayed here during his occupations of Vienna; Napoleon's son, the 'Eaglet', died in the palace in 1832; and Emperor Franz Joseph I, born in 1830, lived and reigned here for decades and died at Schönbrunn in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. After the fall of the empire in 1918, the palace passed to the Austrian Republic, which turned it into a museum. In 1996, the palace and its gardens were declared a Unesco World Heritage Site. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the country: the imperial Habsburg capital with its Ring and its palaces, the Danube and the Wachau valley, and Linz, the industrial city marked by its Nazi past. This is where Austria was born as a state and where its history beat for a thousand years.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name 'Schönbrunn' literally means 'beautiful spring' in German. Tradition has it that Emperor Matthias, while hunting on this land at the beginning of the 17th century, discovered a spring of unusually clear water that he called 'schöner Brunnen' ('beautiful spring'). The whole estate that would in time become the great imperial palace is said to have taken its name from that spring.
At the time, this area west of Vienna lay outside the walled city and was hunting ground dotted with the country retreats of the nobility. In the mid-17th century a hunting residence for the court was built here. But that first building met a tragic end: it was destroyed during the second Ottoman siege of Vienna, in 1683, when the armies of the grand vizier Kara Mustafa laid waste to the outskirts of the city before being defeated.
After the victory over the Ottomans and the passing of the Turkish threat, the Habsburgs found themselves with a chance to rebuild and, above all, to think big. The Schönbrunn estate, close to Vienna but out in open country, was the ideal place to raise a summer residence worthy of imperial prestige.
Towards the end of the 17th century, Emperor Leopold I decided to build at Schönbrunn a residence worthy of the dynasty. The commission went to one of the greatest architects of the Austrian baroque, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, who in 1688-1696 conceived a monumental project. His initial idea was even grander than the palace that was finally built: a colossal complex meant to rival — and even outdo — Louis XIV's Versailles, sited at the top of the hill where the Gloriette stands today.
For reasons of cost and practicality, that first fantastic project was scaled back, and the palace was finally built on the lower part of the estate, next to the gardens. The works of that first phase produced an already imposing building, intended largely for the heir to the throne. Fischer von Erlach died in 1723 and the work continued with his son and other architects.
Although the Schönbrunn we know today owes much to later transformations, it was Fischer von Erlach who set the main lines of the ensemble: the relationship between the palace and the hill, the great axis of the gardens and the ambition to create an imperial residence that would express, in stone and symmetry, the power of the Habsburgs. The project embodies the spirit of the Viennese baroque, that art of grandeur in the service of the monarchy.
If one name is tied to Schönbrunn above all others, it is that of Empress Maria Theresa. When she came to the throne of the Habsburg dominions in 1740, she inherited Schönbrunn and decided to make it her favourite summer residence and the heart of court life. Over her reign (1740-1780), the palace was extended and completely redecorated under the direction of the architect Nikolaus Pacassi, taking on the rococo style and the unmistakable yellow façade — 'Schönbrunn yellow' or 'Theresian yellow' — that characterises it.
It was Maria Theresa who gave Schönbrunn its most famous salons: the Great Gallery, the Millions Room (with its rosewood panels and miniatures), the Chinese cabinets and the state rooms where banquets and balls were held. It was also at her instigation, and on the initiative of her husband Francis I of Lorraine, that the animal collection was founded in 1752 that would give rise to the Tiergarten, today the oldest working zoo in the world, and that the baroque gardens were laid out as we know them, crowned by the Gloriette in 1775.
In that splendid setting one of the best remembered episodes at Schönbrunn took place: in 1762, a six-year-old prodigy called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played before the empress and her family. Tradition says that the boy, having slipped, was helped up by one of the archduchesses — according to legend, the future Marie Antoinette — and that he promised to marry her. Maria Theresa's court made Schönbrunn a centre of power, culture and family life.
Schönbrunn was not only the setting for parties and concerts: it also lived through Europe's great political earthquakes at close quarters. During the Napoleonic wars, when Napoleon Bonaparte's armies occupied Vienna in 1805 and again in 1809, the French emperor set up his headquarters at Schönbrunn, sleeping in the Habsburgs' imperial apartments. It was in the palace that the so-called Treaty of Schönbrunn was signed in 1809, imposing harsh terms on Austria after its defeat.
Fate tied Schönbrunn to Napoleon's family in a tragic way. The French emperor's second marriage was to Marie Louise, daughter of the Austrian emperor Francis I, and from that union came Napoleon II, known as the 'Eaglet' (l'Aiglon) or the Duke of Reichstadt. After his father's fall, the boy was brought up at the Austrian court, at Schönbrunn, practically as another Habsburg. There he spent his last years, ill with tuberculosis, and there he died in 1832, at just 21, in the same room where his father had stayed years earlier. It is one of the most novelistic episodes in the palace's history.
Through the 19th century, Schönbrunn remained the court's summer residence and witnessed the ups and downs of the empire, including the revolution of 1848. But its longest chapter was still to come, with the emperor who lived in its salons longer than any other.
For many people, Schönbrunn is above all the palace of Emperor Franz Joseph I, the figure who embodies the long decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Joseph was born at Schönbrunn in 1830 and came to the throne in 1848, in the middle of a revolution, to reign for 68 years, until his death in 1916: one of the longest reigns in European history. Schönbrunn was his main residence, and his private apartments, now a museum, are preserved there; they are surprisingly austere: the emperor, a man of military habits, slept in a simple camp bed and rose before dawn to work.
Beside him, the figure of Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria, the famous 'Sisi', provides the romantic, melancholy counterpoint. Beautiful, cultured and restless, Sisi bore the rigid court protocol badly and spent long periods travelling. Her rooms at Schönbrunn are part of the tour today and feed the myth of a misunderstood empress whose life ended tragically when she was murdered in Geneva in 1898. The imperial couple suffered other tragedies, such as the suicide of their son, Crown Prince Rudolf, at Mayerling.
Franz Joseph's reign ended with the palace turned into the symbol of a world that was falling apart. The elderly emperor died at Schönbrunn in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. Two years later, in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved and the last emperor, Charles I, signed at Schönbrunn his renunciation of any part in the affairs of government. The palace then passed to the brand-new Austrian Republic, which opened it to the public as a museum. In 1996, the palace and its gardens were inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List, securing their preservation as one of the great baroque legacies of Europe.