Schönbrunn Palace

The main summer residence of the Habsburgs, a Baroque palace of 1,441 rooms whose history, with its gardens, runs over three hundred years and registers the changing tastes of one monarch after another. The name means beautiful spring, after an artesian well the court drank from. Maximilian II bought the floodplain of the Wien river in 1569, fenced it, and stocked it with pheasant, duck, deer and boar as a hunting ground, keeping turkeys and peafowl in a separate enclosure and digging fishponds. It has been a major attraction since the mid-1950s.