Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the performance hall, stables and other facilities, and a
combined morning training & tour
(adult/
child €28/14)
is another option. Tickets can be bought on the website. The visitor centre on
Michaelerplatz sells all tickets, and morning training tickets can also be bought at Gate 2
on Josefsplatz during training sessions.
THE WHITE HORSE IN HISTORY
The Lipizzaner stallion breed dates back to the 1520s, when Ferdinand I imported the first horses from Spain for
the imperial palace. His son Maximilian II imported new stock in the 1560s, and in 1580 Archduke Charles II
established the imperial stud in Lipizza (Lipica, today in Slovenia), giving the horse its name. Austria's nobility
had good reason for looking to Spain for its horses: the Spanish were considered the last word in equine breed-
ing at the time, thanks to Moors from the 7th century who had brought their elegant horses to the Iberian Penin-
sula. Italian horses were added to the stock around the mid-1700s (these too had Spanish blood) and by the
mid-18th century the Lipizzaner had a reputation for being Europe's finest horses.
Over the centuries, natural catastrophe, but more often war, caused the Lipizzaner to be evacuated from their
original stud in Slovenia on numerous occasions. One of their periods of exile from the stud in Lipica was in
1915 due to the outbreak of WWI. Some of the horses went to Laxemburg (just outside Vienna), and others to
Bohemia in today's Czech Republic (at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
When the Austrian monarchy collapsed in 1918, Lipica passed into Italian hands and the horses were divided
between Austria and Italy. The Italians ran the stud in Slovenia, while the Austrians transferred their horses to
Piber, near Graz, which had been breeding military horses for the empire since 1798 - at that time stallions were
mostly crossed with English breeds.
The fortunes of our pirouetting equine friends rose and fell with the collapse of the Habsburg empire and ad-
vent of two world wars. When WWII broke out, Hitler's cohorts goose-stepped in and requisitioned the Piber
stud in Austria and started breeding military horses and - spare the thought! - pack mules there. They also de-
cided to bring the different studs in their occupied regions together under one roof, and Piber's Lipizzaner
wound up in Hostau, situated in Bohemia. Fearing the Lipizzaner would fall into the hands of the Russian army
as it advanced towards the region in 1945 (and amid rather odd fears that the stallions would be eaten), Americ-
an forces seized the Lipizzaner and other horses in Hostau and transferred them back to Austria.
Today, Piber still supplies the Spanish Riding School with its white stallions.
Kaiserliche Schatzkammer
MUSEUM
(Imperial Treasury;
www.kaiserliche-schatzkammer.at
; 01, Schweizerhof; adult/under 19yr €12/free; 9am-5.30pm
Wed-Mon; Herrengasse)
The Schatzkammer contains secular and ecclesiastical treasures of
priceless value and splendour - the sheer wealth of this collection of crown jewels is
staggering. As you walk through the rooms you see magnificent treasures such as a
golden rose, diamond -studded Turkish sabres, a 2680-carat Colombian emerald and, the
highlight of the treasury, the imperial crown. The wood-panelled
Sacred Treasury
has a col-
lection of rare religious relics, some of which can be taken with a grain of salt: fragments
