Schwedenplatz & the Danube Canal

Why is it significant?

Walk to the railing above the water and look across: a green canal between stone embankments, its walls covered in layer upon layer of colourful graffiti, and on the far side a different Vienna, the district of Leopoldstadt. Behind you is the old city with its churches and palaces.

Key Facts

Listen · 2:06

Walk to the railing above the water and look across: a green canal between stone embankments, its walls covered in layer upon layer of colourful graffiti, and on the far side a different Vienna, the district of Leopoldstadt. Behind you is the old city with its churches and palaces. Ahead of you is the island. First, the name of the square under your feet. Schwedenplatz means Swedish Square, and it was named in 1919 as a thank you. After the First World War, Vienna was starving, and Sweden organised food aid and took in thousands of Viennese children to recover in Swedish families. The city said thank you in the most lasting way it knew: with a street sign. And the water is not really a canal at all. Until the nineteenth century the Danube spread out into many arms, with islands and sandbanks that moved with every flood. This was the arm closest to the city walls, the one boats used to reach the markets. When the main river was straightened in the 1870s, this arm was tamed and kept, and Leopoldstadt was left on an island between the canal and the new Danube. Today the canal is Vienna's summer living room. In warm months the banks fill with deckchairs, pop-up bars and people dangling their feet above the water, and long stretches of the walls are open to graffiti artists, so the colours change almost every week. It is one of the few places in this very tidy city where nobody minds the mess. Just a few steps upstream, on Morzinplatz, stood the Hotel Metropole, which after 1938 became the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo. Thousands were interrogated there; a memorial stone marks the spot today. Keep that in mind as you cross, because the district ahead was home to much of Jewish Vienna. Now walk upstream along the embankment to the next bridge, the Salztorbrücke.