Burggarten

The Burggarten is a public park on Vienna's Ringstrasse directly behind the Hofburg, originally laid out in 1819 as the private imperial garden of Francis I. Only after the end of the monarchy in 1919 was it opened to the public, and it still shapes the Viennese ideal of a city garden: baroque paths, looser English lawns and monuments to Mozart, Emperor Franz Joseph and Goethe in between. Its architectural centrepiece is the Art Nouveau Palmenhaus by Friedrich Ohmann from 1907, whose side wing houses the Butterfly House and the popular Cafe Palmenhaus. On warm days Viennese sprawl on the lawn in front of the Mozart memorial with its famous treble-clef flowerbed; on cool ones, the glass halls are a draw of their own.