The Island Across the Canal: Vienna's Leopoldstadt, Augarten and Prater

Cross the Danube Canal into Vienna's second district: graffiti walls, the old Jewish Mazzesinsel, a porcelain palace beside wartime flak towers, Nestroy's theatre street and the Giant Ferris Wheel of The Third Man

Vienna · 12 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Schwedenplatz & the Danube Canal

Schwedenplatz, 1010 Wien, Austria

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.
2. Salztorbrücke: The Salt Gate and the Island

Salztorbrücke, 1010 Wien, Austria

Stop halfway across the bridge and look along the water in both directions: concrete banks painted from end to end, cyclists racing on the lower path, and in summer people lying on the steps with a book as if this were a beach. It feels very modern. The name is not.

Salztor means salt gate. The old city walls once ran along this bank, and one of their gates opened here towards the river. Salt was the white gold of the Middle Ages, used to preserve meat and fish through the winter, and much of it came down the rivers from the salt mines in the mountains to the west. Boats tied up below the walls, and the salt merchants did very good business. The walls have gone, but the gate's name survived in the bridge.

The land on the far side was called the Unterer Werd, the lower island. For centuries it was a soggy, flood-prone place of meadows, fishermen and boatmen, outside the walls and outside the city's protection. Every spring the river could change its shape. Some streets over there still follow the curves of old river arms that disappeared long ago. And when the river froze in winter, ice could pile up and flood the whole island within hours, so its people learned to keep their boats close and their valuables upstairs.

Look at the walls below you. The Danube Canal has some of the largest legal graffiti areas in Vienna, and artists come from all over Europe to paint here. The rule is simple: whatever you paint will be covered by someone else, sometimes the very next day. Old Vienna keeps everything forever, in museums and archives. Down here, nothing lasts a week.

And on the far bank begins the story of a community that was twice expelled from this island. Cross the bridge and walk straight on into the streets of Leopoldstadt, towards the market square a few blocks ahead.
3. Karmelitermarkt: The Heart of the Mazzesinsel

Karmelitermarkt, 1020 Wien, Austria

Step into the square and let the market wrap around you: rows of stalls and small permanent pavilions, crates of vegetables, cheese, bread, flowers, and on Saturdays a farmers' market that fills the whole place. Look at the people too. You may see a young family with a pram, an Orthodox Jewish father in a black hat, a street artist on a coffee break.

This island has a long and painful Jewish history. In 1625 Emperor Ferdinand II assigned the Jews of Vienna to live here, outside the city walls, in a walled ghetto. It grew into one of the important Jewish communities of Central Europe. Then in 1670 Emperor Leopold I expelled them all. Their main synagogue was turned into a church dedicated to Saint Leopold, and the island was renamed after the emperor: Leopoldstadt, Leopold's town.

And yet the community came back. In the nineteenth century, Jews from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary and Galicia arrived through the Nordbahnhof station nearby, and many settled right here. By the early twentieth century a large share of the district's people were Jewish, and the Viennese nicknamed it the Mazzesinsel, the island of matzah. Shops, prayer rooms, theatres and cafés filled these streets.

In 1938 that world was destroyed. Jews were driven from their homes and businesses, crowded into collection apartments here in Leopoldstadt, and deported. Look down at the pavement as you walk on. In front of many doors you will find small brass plaques, the Steine der Erinnerung, stones of remembrance, set since 2005, each with the names of people who lived in that house and were murdered.

Today Jewish life has returned to these streets in small but real ways: kosher shops, schools, a growing community. And the market has become one of the liveliest corners of Vienna. Now take Leopoldsgasse, the street running north from the market, and read the plaques as you go.
4. Leopoldsgasse: A Street of Remembrance

Leopoldsgasse, 1020 Wien, Austria

Walk slowly and keep half an eye on the ground. Leopoldsgasse looks like any other Viennese street: five-storey apartment houses with tall windows, a corner shop, bicycles chained to railings. But every now and then, in front of a doorway, a small square of brass catches the light.

Bend down and read one. A name, a year of birth, a date of deportation, a place: Theresienstadt, Minsk, Auschwitz, Maly Trostinec. These are the Steine der Erinnerung, the stones of remembrance. They are not set by the city but by neighbours, relatives and local volunteers, who research who lived in each house and pay for each stone. A whole family is sometimes listed on a single plate, outside the door they last walked through.

Before 1938, this was the everyday heart of the Mazzesinsel. Along streets like this one stood small prayer houses in courtyards, kosher butchers, booksellers, tailors and coffee houses where people argued about politics in four languages. Many families had arrived only a generation earlier from the eastern provinces of the empire, poor and hopeful, and Leopoldstadt was the first stop on their way into Viennese life.

After the Anschluss in March 1938, Jewish Viennese were forced out of their homes all over the city. Many were pushed into overcrowded flats here in Leopoldstadt, several families to an apartment, before the deportations began in 1941. Of the roughly two hundred thousand Jews who lived in Vienna before 1938, most escaped into exile, but tens of thousands were murdered. The district lost a whole world, and the stones are a way of putting the names back on the street.

And still, life returned. Today you can hear Hebrew, Russian, Turkish and German along these pavements, and Jewish schools and synagogues are active in the district again. Now carry on to the end of the street, cross Obere Augartenstraße and enter the Augarten, heading for the huge grey tower you can already see above the trees.
5. Augarten Flak Tower: The Concrete Giant

Augarten, 1020 Wien, Austria

There it is, rising above the chestnut trees of a Baroque park: a windowless cylinder of grey concrete, about fifty-five metres high, with a platform of jutting gun emplacements around the top. Birds circle it. Joggers pass at its feet. It is completely out of place, and it will never go away.

This is a Flakturm, a flak tower, built by the Nazi regime in 1944 and 1945 to defend Vienna against Allied bombers. The towers came in pairs: a round gun tower like this one, carrying heavy anti-aircraft guns, and a square fire-control tower with radar and rangefinders, which you can see further north in the park. Vienna received three pairs, in the Augarten, in Arenbergpark and in Esterházypark, designed by the architect Friedrich Tamms. Much of the work was done by forced labourers.

They were also meant as shelters, and thousands of civilians crowded inside during air raids. And they were meant as monuments: the plans foresaw cladding them in stone after a victory, as memorials to the war. History made other plans.

After 1945 the problem was simple: how do you remove something like this? The walls are metres thick, reinforced with steel, and blowing them up in the middle of a residential district would have shattered every window around, or worse. So they stayed. Over the decades Vienna has made its peace with them, more or less. One in Esterházypark now holds an aquarium, the Haus des Meeres, with a climbing wall on the outside. Another serves as a storage depot. The two here in the Augarten stand mostly empty, fenced off, home mostly to pigeons.

Stand here for a moment and think of the contrast. Behind you, a garden of clipped lime avenues opened to the people by an enlightened emperor. In front of you, the concrete fist of a dictatorship. Both are part of Vienna. Now follow the long avenue east through the park towards the Baroque palace, where something much more delicate is made.
6. Augarten Palace & Porcelain Manufactory

Obere Augartenstraße 1, 1020 Wien, Austria

In front of you stands a modest Baroque palace at the edge of the park, its windows looking out over lime avenues and lawns. Inside, behind those windows, people are sitting at long tables with fine brushes, painting flowers on cups by hand, as they have done in Vienna for three centuries.

In the early eighteenth century, porcelain was a European obsession. Only China and Japan knew how to make true hard porcelain, until Meissen in Saxony cracked the secret in 1710 and guarded it fiercely. Then, in 1718, a Viennese court official named Claudius Innocentius du Paquier received a privilege from Emperor Charles VI and opened the second porcelain manufactory in Europe. The story goes that he managed it by luring away workers from Meissen who knew the recipe... and that one of them, before returning to Saxony, tried to sabotage the kilns.

In 1744 Empress Maria Theresa took the factory over for the state, and Viennese porcelain became famous for its colours and its gold. Every piece was marked with a little blue shield, the Austrian coat of arms, and that shield is still the mark today. The state factory closed in 1864, unable to compete with cheaper industry, but in 1923 the craft was revived here in the Augarten, in this palace, where it has stayed ever since.

Look out for the gate on Obere Augartenstraße. In 1775 Emperor Joseph II opened the Augarten to everyone, and over the main portal he placed an inscription dedicating the park to all people as a place of pleasure, from one who esteems them. It was an unusual thing for an emperor to say. Mozart gave morning concerts in the Augarten in the 1780s, and the Viennese came to stroll, flirt and be seen.

The neighbouring palace has young residents: the boarding school of the Vienna Boys' Choir. Now walk south down the park to its very tip, where the two Augarten streets meet, and you will find the choir's own concert hall.
7. MuTh: The Vienna Boys' Choir at the Augartenspitz

Am Augartenspitz 1, 1020 Wien, Austria

At the southern point of the Augarten, where two streets meet like the bow of a ship, you see a curving modern building of glass and pale stone attached to an old Baroque gatehouse. It is the MuTh, short for music and theatre, the concert hall of the Vienna Boys' Choir.

The choir is far older than the building. Its roots go back to 1498, when Emperor Maximilian I ordered that his court chapel should have boys singing in it. For centuries these boys sang at mass for the Habsburgs. One of them, from 1808, was a schoolmaster's son from the suburbs called Franz Schubert, and the story goes that when his voice broke in 1812, he scribbled into a sheet of music that he had crowed for the last time.

After the monarchy fell in 1918, the court chapel had no more court, and the boys' choir nearly disappeared. In 1924 it was refounded as a private institution, dressed in sailor suits, and sent around the world. Today there are four touring choirs of boys aged around ten to fourteen, and they give hundreds of concerts a year on every continent. Their boarding school is in the Augarten palace you have just passed.

This little hall was not built quietly. When the plans appeared, many residents fought to keep this corner of the historic park free of new buildings. There were petitions, court cases and an occupation of the site that lasted many months. In the end the hall was built and opened in December 2012. Whatever you think of it, the fight showed how much the people of Leopoldstadt love their Augarten.

If the doors are open and you hear voices inside, stop and listen: few sounds in Vienna are as old as this one. Now leave the park and head south-east through the quiet streets to Praterstraße, the old grand boulevard of the district, and a square named after a comedian.
8. Nestroyplatz: The Comedian Who Fought the Censor

Nestroyplatz, 1020 Wien, Austria

You are standing on a busy square where Praterstraße widens, with trams, traffic and an underground station beneath your feet. Look along the boulevard: broad pavements, grand nineteenth-century apartment houses, and on the corner a handsome building with the name Nestroyhof on it.

The square is named after Johann Nestroy, born in Vienna in 1801, the funniest and most dangerous man in Viennese theatre. He trained in law, sang bass at the opera, and then discovered that his real talent was making audiences laugh until it hurt. He wrote more than eighty plays, comedies full of songs and wordplay, and acted the leading roles himself, tall, lanky and razor-tongued.

The problem was the censor. In the age of Metternich every script had to be approved, and Nestroy's specialty was the line the censor had cut, delivered anyway, with a look or an ad-lib. He once ended up under arrest for a few days for insulting a critic from the stage. Here is the surprising part: one of his plays, Einen Jux will er sich machen, crossed the Atlantic. Thornton Wilder adapted it into The Matchmaker, and that became the musical Hello, Dolly.

Praterstraße was the theatre street of Leopoldstadt. The Carltheater stood a few steps from here, and Nestroy ran it in the 1850s. It was destroyed in the Second World War and later demolished. The Nestroyhof on the corner, built in 1898 by the architect Oskar Marmorek, held a small theatre that in the 1920s and 1930s became a stage for Jewish theatre and cabaret, until 1938 ended it. Today it is a theatre again. And a little further up the boulevard, at number 54, Johann Strauss the younger lived when he wrote the Blue Danube waltz in 1867.

Before you move on, there is one more place in these streets that should not be missed. Turn into the small side street just south of the square, Tempelgasse, and walk a few steps to four tall white columns standing in front of a modern building.
9. Leopoldstadt Temple Memorial

Tempelgasse 5, 1020 Wien, Austria

In front of a modern building you see four tall white columns, standing on their own, holding up nothing. They are not decoration. They are a measurement: they show you how tall and how wide the building was that once stood here.

This was the Leopoldstädter Tempel, the great synagogue of Leopoldstadt, opened in 1858. The architect Ludwig Förster, who also helped plan the Ringstrasse, designed it in a Moorish style, with arches and patterned brickwork recalling the synagogues of medieval Spain. It was the largest synagogue in Vienna, and for eighty years it was the pride of the Mazzesinsel, the place for great festivals, weddings and sermons.

On the night of the 9th to the 10th of November 1938, during the pogrom the Nazis called Reichskristallnacht, it was set on fire and destroyed. That night almost every synagogue and prayer house in Vienna was wrecked, thousands of Jewish shops and homes were looted, and thousands of Jewish men were arrested, many sent to Dachau. Of Vienna's many synagogues, only the Stadttempel in the old town survived as a building, because it was hidden inside a residential block and could not be burned without setting the houses around it alight.

In the years that followed, around sixty-five thousand Austrian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The ruins of this temple were cleared, and for decades the site was simply a plot with an ordinary building on it. In 1997 these columns were erected, a light, simple sign that lets you imagine the size of what was lost.

Today the building behind the columns serves the Jewish community again, and the street carries the temple's name. Take a quiet moment here. Then return to Praterstraße and follow it north-east to its end, where it opens onto a great roundabout and the column of an admiral rises from the traffic.
10. Praterstern & the Tegetthoff Column

Praterstern, 1020 Wien, Austria

Here the streets of Leopoldstadt all run into one huge roundabout, and in the middle a tall column rises out of the traffic, studded with the bronze prows of warships. On top stands a man in a naval coat, gazing out over a city that has no sea.

He is Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff. In July 1866, off the Adriatic island of Lissa, today's Vis in Croatia, he led the Austrian fleet against a larger and more modern Italian one. He ordered his flagship to ram the Italian flagship, the Re d'Italia, which sank within minutes. Austria won the battle. And here is the paradox: it lost the war anyway, beaten by Prussia on land, and had to give up Venice regardless.

Tegetthoff became a national hero, and when he died young in 1871, Vienna gave him this column, unveiled in 1886. Count the prows if you like. They recall the ancient Roman habit of decorating monuments with the bows of captured ships. An admiral in the middle of Vienna, a city far from any coast, makes sense only when you remember that the empire stretched down to Trieste and the Adriatic.

The roundabout has another story. This was the site of the Nordbahnhof, the terminus of the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn, Austria's first steam railway, which opened in 1837. Its lines ran north to Moravia, Galicia and beyond, and for decades every newcomer from those lands stepped off the train here. That is why so many of them settled right next door in Leopoldstadt. The grand old station has long gone; a modern one stands in its place.

Now look east, over the roofs and trees. You can already see a great wheel turning slowly against the sky. Cross towards the Prater, past the first stalls and lights, and walk to its foot.
11. The Giant Ferris Wheel & Wurstelprater

Riesenradplatz 1, 1020 Wien, Austria

Tilt your head back. Above you the Riesenrad, the Giant Ferris Wheel, turns so slowly you almost have to stare to see it move, its red cabins hanging from a web of steel spokes. Around it, the Wurstelprater shrieks and glitters: roller coasters, ghost trains, carousels and the smell of fried dough.

The wheel was built in 1897 by the English engineer Walter Basset for an amusement park called Venice in Vienna, complete with canals and gondolas. It stands about sixty-five metres tall, and for a while it was one of the largest wheels in the world. Most of the giant wheels of that age, in London, Paris and Chicago, were torn down long ago. This one is still turning.

It nearly did not survive. In the last days of the war in 1945, the wheel caught fire and its cabins burned. It was repaired with only half of its original cabins, fifteen instead of thirty, and that is how it still looks today.

Then came the film that made it immortal. In The Third Man, from 1949, shot in the ruins of a Vienna divided between four occupying powers, Orson Welles as the racketeer Harry Lime rides this wheel with his old friend. From the top he looks down at the people below, tiny as dots, and asks whether it would really matter if one of them stopped moving. Then he delivers his famous cynical speech about the Borgias and Swiss cuckoo clocks, a line Welles is said to have written himself.

And why Wurstelprater? Not because of sausages, though there are plenty, but after Hanswurst, the clown of old Viennese popular theatre, whose puppet shows entertained crowds here. It all goes back to 1766, when Emperor Joseph II threw open the Prater, until then an imperial hunting ground, to the people of Vienna. Now walk past the wheel to the long straight avenue of chestnut trees that begins just beyond it.
12. Prater Hauptallee: Vienna's Green Runway

Prater Hauptallee, 1020 Wien, Austria

Here it is: an avenue so straight that it seems to run to the horizon, lined on both sides by tall chestnut trees, with runners, cyclists, prams and dog walkers flowing along it in both directions. The Hauptallee runs for more than four kilometres through the Prater, almost all the way to the Danube.

For centuries this was where Vienna came to show itself. Once the Prater was opened to the public, the nobility drove their carriages up and down the avenue on fine days, especially on the first of May, in a parade called the Praterkorso. Everyone watched who rode with whom, who had new horses, who had a new mistress. At the far end stands the Lusthaus, an elegant little pavilion that marked the end of the drive.

Then, on the first of May 1890, a very different crowd arrived. Tens of thousands of workers marched into the Prater for the first May Day demonstration, demanding the eight-hour day. The authorities expected riots, and many shops stayed shut. Instead the workers came in their Sunday best and walked peacefully along the same avenue the aristocrats used. From then on, the first of May belonged to them too.

The Prater has seen darker days as well. Its great stadium, opened in 1931 and now named after the football coach Ernst Happel, was used in September 1939 to detain about a thousand Jewish men before their deportation to Buchenwald. And the Rotunde, the huge domed hall of the World Exhibition of 1873, stood beside this avenue until it burned down in 1937.

So here ends the walk: on an island that began with salt boats and a ghetto, survived flak towers and fire, and still keeps its funfair and its green avenue for everyone. Stroll on under the chestnuts as far as you like, or turn back to Praterstern, where trains and the U-Bahn will take you anywhere in Vienna.