Schönbrunn began as a Habsburg hunting ground stocked with boar and pheasants
Vienna's most visited sight started life in 1569 as a fenced floodplain where an emperor kept deer, ducks and boar for sport. It grew into a 1,441-room Baroque summer palace, hosted Kennedy and Khrushchev, and took its name from a beautiful spring that supplied the court's drinking water.
Emperor Maximilian II bought the land beside the Wien river, together with a mansion called Katterburg built in 1548, and turned it into a game park with fishponds and exotic birds such as turkeys and peafowl. Eleonora Gonzaga, a keen hunter and the widow of Ferdinand II, received it as her residence and added a palace between 1638 and 1643. The name Schönbrunn first turns up on an invoice in 1642, and the orangery probably goes back to her too.
The palace visitors see today took shape in the 1740s and 1750s under Maria Theresa, who had received the estate as a wedding gift, with Baron Diego Pereira d'Aguilar as builder; Franz I later gave the exterior its neoclassical dress. In 1775 the Gloriette was set on a 60-metre hill at the end of the garden axis, meant to celebrate Habsburg power and built partly from leftover stone of Schloss Neugebäude. A fake Roman ruin, first called the Ruin of Carthage, followed in 1778, feeding the fashion for picturesque decay.
Franz Joseph was born in the palace and died there on 21 November 1916, aged 86. When the monarchy fell in 1918 the new Austrian Republic kept it as a museum. American bombers struck it in February 1945, and during the Allied occupation British officials used it as offices until 1955. In 1961 it staged the meeting between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.
Since 1992 a company wholly owned by the Austrian state has run palace and gardens without subsidies, and UNESCO listed the ensemble in 1996 as a Baroque synthesis of the arts. The grounds hold a zoo that claims to be the world's oldest, a palm house from 1882 and a former drill ground for young Habsburg princes. Almost 4 million people visited in 2017, and the Vienna Philharmonic has played a summer night concert in the gardens every year since 2004.
Source: Schönbrunn Palace
