The Stallburg and the Spanish Riding School
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly along the lane and look through the arches of the old Renaissance building beside you. With luck you will see a white head looking back at you over a stable door.
Key Facts
| Place | The Stallburg and the Spanish Riding School |
|---|---|
| Address | Reitschulgasse 2, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20720, 16.36800 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Imperial Heart: The Hofburg, the Habsburg Crypt and Six Centuries of Empire |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly along the lane and look through the arches of the old Renaissance building beside you. With luck you will see a white head looking back at you over a stable door. This is the Stallburg, and the Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School live here, in the middle of the city, as they have for generations.
The Stallburg was built in the 1560s as a residence for the future Emperor Maximilian II, and only later became the imperial stables. Across the lane rises the Winter Riding School, a white Baroque hall built between 1729 and 1735 by Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach, where the horses perform their slow, impossible dance under chandeliers.
Why Spanish? Because the breed goes back to Spanish horses, the most prized in Renaissance Europe. In 1580 Archduke Charles founded a stud at Lipica, near the Adriatic, which gave the Lipizzaners their name. Today they are bred at Piber in Styria. And here is the surprise: they are born dark, brown or almost black, and turn white only gradually, over six to ten years.
The riding hall has seen more than horses. In 1848, the year of revolution, Austria's first elected parliament met inside it, with deputies sitting where the stallions now trot. And at the end of the Second World War, the breeding herd was in real danger. American troops under General George Patton helped bring the mares and foals to safety, a rescue that still makes old riders in Vienna emotional.
The movements the horses perform, the leaps and the high, almost floating steps, grew out of the training of war horses, though no cavalry officer ever rode quite like this. The school calls itself the oldest riding academy in the world still practising classical horsemanship. Now walk on to the end of the lane, where it opens into a round square under a great green dome.