Schonbrunn Palace is a former imperial summer residence in Vienna, Austria. One of the most important cultural monuments in the country, since the 1960s it has been one of the major visitor attractions in Vienna. The palace and gardens illustrate the tastes, interests, and hopes of successive Habsburg monarchs.

In the year 1569, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II purchased a huge floodplain of the Wien brook beneath a hill, situated between Meidling and Hietzing, where a former owner, in 1548, had erected a mansion called Katterburg. The emperor ordered the area to be fenced and put game there like pheasants, ducks, deer and boar, to serve as the court’s recreational hunting ground. In alittle separate part of the area,’exotic’ birds like turkeys and peafowl were kept. Fishponds were built, too.

The name Schnbrunn ( meaning’beautiful spring’ ), has its roots in an artesian well from which water was consumed by the court.
in the next century, the area was used as a hunting and recreation ground. Particularly Eleonore Gonzaga, who liked hunting, used up a lot of time there and was left the area as her widow’s residence after the demise of her partner, Ferdinand II. From 1638 to 1643, she added a palace to the Katterburg mansion, while in 1642 came the first mention of the name’Schnbrunn’ on an invoice. The origins of the Schnbrunn orangery appear to return to Eleonore Gonzaga as well.

Emperor Leopold I gave architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach the order to create a new palace. His first draft was a very utopian one, working with different antique and contemporary ideals and making an attempt to top its role model Versailles. His second draft showed a smaller and more practical building. Construction started in 1696 and after three years the first festivities were held in the newly built middle part of the palace.

Few parts of the first palace survived that century, because particularly Maria Theresa of Austria to whom the estate was made as a present by her father ( who, himself, had shown but little interest in it ) had made a decision to make it the imperial summer residence, after she was crowned. She ordered her architect-of-the-court Nicol Pacassi to reshape the palace and garden in a way of the style of the Rococo age. At the end of the so-called Theresianian era, Schnbrunn Palace was apowerful centre of Austria’s empire and the imperial family, and stayed their summer residence till the more-or-less’abdication’ of Charles I of Austria, in 1918.

In the 19th century one name is closely connected with Schnbrunn’s, Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria. He was born there, spent the majority of his life there and died there on November 21, 1916 in his sleeping room. Thru the course of his 68-years reign, Schnbrunn Palace was regarded as a Gesamtkunstwerk ( total work of creativity ) and remodelled as agreed by its history.

The sculpted garden space between the palace and the Neptune Well ( viewn towards Gloriette, which is on top of the hill ) is named the Great Parterre (’Great Ground Floor’ ). The French garden, a big part of the area, was planned by Jean Trehet in 1695. It contains, among others, a maze.

The complex however includes by much more attractions : Besides the Tiergarten, world’s oldest existing zoo ( set up in 1752 ), an orangerie erected around 1755, staple luxuries of European palaces of its type, a Palm house ( replacing, by 1882, around 10 earlier and smaller glass homes in the western part of the park ) is noteworthy. Western parts were turned into English garden style in 1828-1852. At the outmost western edge, a botanical garden going back to an earlier arboretum was re-arranged in 1828, when the Old Palm House was built. This one is presently being restored and partly will be house a modern enclosure for Orang-Utans, besides arestaurant and office rooms. It’ll be re-opened in 2009.

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