Innere Stadt, Vienna, Austria
Hofburg · HOHF-boork
The winter home of the Habsburgs for more than six hundred years, in the middle of Vienna. It is a small town of palaces joined together: eighteen wings, nineteen courtyards and about 2,600 rooms, added to by almost every ruler and never finished. It holds a thousand-year-old crown, a library like a cathedral, white horses that dance, and a balcony Austria still does not know what to do with.
Photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
A castle on this spot is first recorded in 1279, soon after the Habsburg family took Austria. In China that is the year the Southern Song dynasty (南宋, 1127–1279) fell to the Mongols. The family stayed until 1918.
They never pulled the old parts down. Each ruler built a new wing beside the last, in the style of his own day. To walk through the courtyards is to walk through seven centuries, out of order.
Close by, with a page of its own: Schönbrunn Palace, Prague Castle.
Some eighteen wings round a chain of courts. Walking through is free. Each interior has its own door and ticket.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The courtyards, Michaelerplatz, Josefsplatz and Heldenplatz | Free, at all hours |
| The Sisi Museum and the Imperial Apartments | One ticket for both; entrance by the Kaisertor in the inner court since January 2026 |
| The Imperial Treasury | Separate ticket |
| The State Hall of the National Library | Separate ticket |
| The Spanish Riding School | Separate tickets for morning exercise, tours and performances |
| The palace chapel | Tickets for Sunday Mass with the choir; standing room is free |
| The museums in the Neue Burg | Separate tickets |
A green dome, a curving white front, giant statues of Hercules clubbing his enemies on either side of the gate. It looks like the proud old face of the empire. It is the newest face. This front was finished in 1893, to a design that had waited in a drawer for 160 years, and the empire had twenty-five years left.
Walk through the gate, under the dome. Nobody will stop you. The way through the palace is a public street and always has been. Carriages and cars used it.
On the other side is a courtyard, and beyond it a red gate from 1552, and beyond that the oldest walls. The further in you go, the further back.
"The Hofburg is a palace." It is a cluster of some eighteen wings. There is no single entrance and no single ticket. The emperor's rooms, the crown, the library and the horses each have their own door and their own price.
"It is a museum now." The President of Austria works in one wing. There are ministries, a conference centre, the national library, a church with a choir, and people living in flats under the roofs.
"Sisi lived here happily." She disliked the place, called it a prison, and was away from Vienna for most of her last thirty years.
"The Spanish Riding School is Spanish." The horses came from Spain in the sixteenth century. The school has been in Vienna ever since.
The courtyards and squares are public and free at all hours. Stops 4 to 7 are indoors, each with its own ticket.
Two fountains flank the front. On the left a ship's prow cuts through sea monsters: Power at Sea. On the right is Power on Land. When they were carved in the 1890s, Austria still had a coast and a navy.
In the middle of the square, behind a railing, is a pit with Roman walls. A legionary camp stood near here, and these were houses along the road outside it.
Until 1888 the old court theatre stood where the dome is now. Mozart's Marriage of Figaro was first performed in it, in 1786.
Look across at the plain house opposite, with no ornament round its windows. It was built in 1911 and Vienna hated it.
Through the dome you come out in a square court called simply In der Burg, in the castle. The bronze emperor in a Roman toga is Francis, who hosted the Congress of Vienna.
Look up at the little tower on the building behind him. It has a clock, and below the clock a sundial, and above it a ball that shows the phase of the moon.
Red, black and gold, dated 1552. The grooves on either side are where the chains of the drawbridge ran: there was a moat here. The gold letters list Ferdinand's titles: king of Germany, Hungary and Bohemia, prince of Spain, archduke of Austria, duke of Burgundy.
Inside is the oldest court, with thirteenth-century walls under the plaster. Steps on the right lead up to the palace chapel of 1449. The Vienna Boys' Choir, founded for this chapel in 1498, sings Mass here on Sunday mornings from September to June. Schubert sang in it as a boy.
The door is under the chapel steps. In room after dark room are the things that made a man an emperor. The crown of the Holy Roman Empire is the centre of it: eight gold plates hinged together, set with pearls and uncut stones, made in the second half of the tenth century. In China that is the first years of the Northern Song (北宋, 960–1127). It is not round, and no head fits it well.
Beside it is an iron spearhead, bound with gold. For centuries it was believed to be the lance that pierced Christ's side, with a nail from the Cross inside it. Tests date it to the eighth century.
These pieces were kept in Nuremberg until 1800, when they were sent here out of Napoleon's reach. In 1938 Hitler took them back to Nuremberg. American soldiers found them in a bunker in 1945 and returned them to Vienna.
The rooms are red, white and gold, and smaller than you expect. In the audience chamber stands the high desk. In the emperor's study hang two portraits of his wife with her hair down. In his bedroom, the iron bed again.
Her rooms are next. Look for the wooden bars on the wall and the rings in the doorway. Her bathroom had the first bathtub in the palace. The museum beside the apartments, redesigned in 2026, shows her dresses, her travelling medicine chest, and the file.
A quiet white square with an emperor on horseback. The film-makers of The Third Man put Harry Lime's flat in the palace facing the statue. Its doorway, held up by four stone women, is unchanged.
The same shot: stand by the statue's railing and frame the doorway at night, when the square is nearly empty.
Up the stairs behind the statue is the State Hall of the old court library, built from 1723. It is nearly eighty metres long and twenty high, under a painted dome. Two hundred thousand books in walnut cases climb the walls. Some of the cases are doors: they swing open on rooms with more books.
The Winter Riding School is a white hall with a chandelier and two galleries, finished in 1735, in which the only colour is the riders' brown coats. The horses are Lipizzaners. They are born dark and turn white over six to ten years. Stallions and riders train together for years before they perform.
As each rider enters he lifts his hat to a portrait at the far end. It is of the emperor who built the hall.
The stables are across the lane, in a Renaissance courtyard with three tiers of arcades. From the street you can sometimes see a white head looking out.
Go back through the inner court and out through the far arch. The space opens. A long curved palace with a colonnade stands on one side: the Neue Burg, the new castle, finished in 1913. A second, matching wing was to face it, and a forum of museums was to join them. Then came the war.
Two bronze generals ride here. The nearer one, on a horse that stands on its hind legs alone, is Archduke Charles, who beat Napoleon in 1809.
On 15 March 1938, three days after German troops crossed the border, Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria, stood on the central balcony of the Neue Burg and announced that his homeland had joined the German Reich. Some two hundred thousand people filled this square and cheered.
For decades Austria described itself as Hitler's first victim. The photographs of this square were the answer. The balcony is kept closed. A museum of Austrian history opened behind it in 2018, and what to do with the balcony itself is still argued over.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1279 | A castle here is first recorded | Kublai Khan completes the Mongol conquest of China |
| 1552 | The Swiss Gate is built | Ivan the Terrible takes Kazan |
| 1683 | A Turkish army besieges Vienna and mines the bastion in front of the palace | Britain's first public museum opens in Oxford |
| 1735 | The Winter Riding School is finished | Linnaeus publishes his System of Nature |
| 1814 | The Congress of Vienna dances | Napoleon is sent to Elba |
| 1898 | The empress Elisabeth is murdered in Geneva | Spain and the United States go to war |
| 1913 | The Neue Burg is finished | Ford starts the moving assembly line |
| 1918 | The last emperor leaves; the republic is declared | The First World War ends |
| 1938 | Hitler speaks from the balcony | The Munich Agreement is signed |
| 2018 | A museum of Austrian history opens in the Neue Burg | A century since the end of the First World War |
One line to remember: not one palace but seven centuries of palaces, and the last piece was finished five years before the family left.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The sculptor of Archduke Charles balanced the whole weight of the bronze on the horse's two hind hooves. He is said to have gone mad because he could not do it a second time: the horse of the other statue rests on its tail.
Source: A Viennese story. Anton Dominik Fernkorn did fall ill and died in an asylum in 1878; the second horse does rest on its tail
The emperor is said to have so disliked the bare new house opposite his gate that he had the curtains on that side kept shut and never again left by Michaelerplatz.
Source: Told in Vienna since the 1910s about Adolf Loos's building of 1911. No court record confirms it
Whoever holds the Holy Lance is said to hold the fate of the world, and to lose his life when he loses the lance. Hitler is said to have stood before it as a young man and sworn to own it.
Source: Medieval belief in the lance's power is real. The Hitler story comes from Trevor Ravenscroft's book The Spear of Destiny (1973) and has no evidence behind it
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The Burghauptmannschaft Österreich, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Austrian National Library on their own buildings; ticket and opening information from 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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