Six square kilometres of former imperial hunting ground, with a Ferris wheel of 1897 at one end and silence at the other.
The Prater was imperial hunting ground until 1766, when Joseph II opened it to the public — a genuinely radical act at the time, and one the aristocracy objected to loudly.
Most visitors see only the Wurstelprater, the funfair at the Praterstern end: a permanent fairground, free to walk into, with rides paid for individually. It is loud, unpretentious and slightly frayed, and it has been that way for two centuries.
The Riesenrad
The Ferris wheel was built in 1897 by the English engineer Walter Basset for Franz Joseph’s golden jubilee. It is 65 metres high, turns very slowly, and carries fifteen red wooden cabins — originally thirty, halved after war damage in 1945, which is why the spacing looks odd.
It is famous mostly because of The Third Man, in which Orson Welles delivers the cuckoo-clock speech in one of the cabins. You can hire a cabin for dinner, which is expensive and which people do anyway.
The view is good rather than spectacular — the Prater is flat and low — but the machinery, visible as you board, is the actual attraction.
The Green Prater
This is the part worth your afternoon. The Hauptallee runs four and a half kilometres dead straight from Praterstern to the Lusthaus, lined with chestnut trees, closed to cars, and full of runners, cyclists and prams. Either side of it the park is woodland, meadow and side channels of the Danube, and it is genuinely quiet.
At the far end, the Lusthaus is an eighteenth-century octagonal pavilion, now a café.
Also in the park: the Ernst Happel Stadium, Austria’s national football ground; a miniature railway, the Liliputbahn; and the Planetarium and Prater Museum at the funfair end.
Practicalities
Praterstern station is on U1 and U2 and has a reputation, deserved in the past, as an unpleasant corner late at night. It was substantially cleaned up and is now unremarkable, but it is still not where you want to linger at three in the morning.
The funfair is seasonal in parts — most rides run from March to October, some year-round. The park itself is open always and free.
