Vienna's Secret Places

Between 1840 and 1940, a bend in the Danube used to wash up the bodies of people who had drowned or been murdered upstream. Many were never identified. Rather than bury them without record, the city gave them their own dedicated cemetery — the only burial ground in the world set aside specifically for a river's victims.

The Danube's course has since been altered, so no new bodies have washed up here since the last burial in 1940. The older section, where 478 unidentified people were buried between 1840 and 1900, has been fully reclaimed by riparian forest; only a single memorial cross marks it today. The newer section is better tended, framed by tall trees, and eerily peaceful.

It briefly found global fame as a filming location in the 1995 movie "Before Sunrise", starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy — a detail most visitors who stumble on it have no idea about.

In the 4th district, a cluster of ordinary apartment courtyards was once a genuine urban wasteland — concrete, rubble, oil drums, broken glass, barbed wire. Only the trees were already there. Over time, residents combined and planted the connected courtyards themselves, turning the whole block into what they affectionately call "Plani".

Today it's a proper neighborhood park: greened facades, cozy pergolas, a large sandbox for kids, and meadow-like planting that invites a slow walk in any season. It's still informally run by the people who live around it, which gives it a lived-in, unpolished feel that a city-planned park rarely has.

There's no single dramatic view or landmark here — the appeal is simply that it's a real Viennese courtyard garden, made by its own neighbors rather than a design brief.

Vienna is famous for its formal, carefully tended green spaces — the Prater, the Volksgarten, the Stadtpark. The Erdberger Stadtwildnis is the deliberate opposite: an ecological development site in the 3rd district that the city set aside specifically to let nature take over, unmanaged.

The result is dense, rough, almost scrubby vegetation that looks nothing like a planned park — exactly the point. Plants and animals pushed out of the built-up city have reclaimed this pocket of land, making it as much a functioning habitat as a place for a walk.

It won't suit anyone looking for manicured paths or a picnic lawn, but for a quiet, genuinely different side of Vienna's green spaces, it's a short detour from the Erdberg area worth taking.