Fourteen hundred rooms of Habsburg summer residence, a garden you can walk for free, and the oldest zoo in the world.
Schönbrunn was the Habsburgs’ summer palace, which in practice meant the seat of an empire for large parts of the year. Maria Theresa made it what it is in the mid-eighteenth century, and it is her taste — Rococo, yellow-ochre, relentlessly gilded — that you walk through.
It has 1,441 rooms. You see forty at most.
The tours
Two standard routes, both with a timed entry slot and an audio guide.
The Imperial Tour covers twenty-two rooms: Franz Joseph’s spartan bedroom and study, Elisabeth’s apartments, the ceremonial rooms.
The Grand Tour adds another eighteen, including the Hall of Mirrors where a six-year-old Mozart played for Maria Theresa in 1762, the Millions Room panelled in rosewood and inset with Indo-Persian miniatures, and the Chinese cabinets. If you are coming at all, take the Grand Tour — the extra rooms are the interesting ones.
Tickets are timed and sell out in summer. Book online, days ahead.
The gardens
Free, enormous, and open from early morning to dusk. The parterre runs up to the Gloriette, a colonnade on the hill built in 1775 from stone salvaged from a demolished palace, with a café inside and the best view back down over the palace to the city.
Also in the grounds, mostly ticketed separately: the maze, the Palm House, the Orangery, and the Tiergarten — founded as an imperial menagerie in 1752 and the oldest continuously operating zoo in the world, which is genuinely good rather than merely old.
Timing
The palace opens at eight or half past depending on season. The first slots are the quietest by a wide margin; by midday the queue for the ticket office is long even if you have booked, because you still need to collect.
The gardens are best early or in the last hour of light. In December a Christmas market runs in the forecourt and in summer the Philharmonic plays a free open-air concert in the grounds.
Allow half a day if you are doing palace and gardens properly. It is a fifteen-minute U-Bahn ride from the centre, so it is easy to come back.
More Landmarks
St Stephen's Cathedral
A tiled roof of a quarter of a million glazed tiles, a tower you climb by 343 steps, and catacombs full of Habsburg organs.
The Hofburg
The Habsburgs' winter residence for six centuries, now holding the Sisi Museum, the imperial silver and the crown jewels.
The Belvedere
Two Baroque palaces on a slope, with Klimt's Kiss in the upper one and the best view of Vienna's skyline from between them.