Augarten

The park is designed in the French Baroque style with elaborate flower gardens and impressive shady avenues of chestnut, lime, ash, and maple.

There are two places in the park where meals or snacks may be had, the Bunkerei (partially housed in a former bunker) and on the premises of the Filmarchiv, and in addition two catering establishments, one of them in the Atelier Augarten.

Around 1650, Ferdinand III bought up the area around the nearby Tábor (which is a Czech word used here for a fortified checkpoint outside the city's walls) at a branch of the unregulated Danube.

In the 1660s, Leopold I acquired the adjacent gardens from the noble Trautson family and had it transformed into an all-comprising[clarification needed] pleasure park.

1683 was a bad year for Vienna and the Augarten: during the course of the Turkish siege the grounds and buildings were destroyed in their entirety, with exception of some parts of the walls.

A few years later, in 1712, the new monarch, Charles VI, commissioned landscape architect Jean Trehet - also responsible for the creation of the gardens at Schönbrunn as well as at the Belvedere - to carry out new plans to develop the whole park, in French style.

The entrance at that time was still guarded by soldiers, whilst inside the park grounds war invalids and other handicapped people maintained order.

The inscription Allen Menschen gewidmeter Erlustigungs-Ort von Ihrem Schaetzer ("A place of amusement dedicated to all people by their Cherisher") can still be read at the main gate to the Augarten from Obere Augartenstrasse.

Joseph II in 1781 ordered Isidore Canevale to erect a humble structure for the emperor and used to spend his summers there; it has become known as Josefsstöckl and is still existing today.

During the disastrous inundation which afflicted Vienna from February 1 to March 1 of 1830, the entire Augarten was flooded to a depth of 1.75 metres (5 ft 9 in).

During the Second World War, military authorities chose the Augarten as one of several places to erect massive buildings for anti-aircraft defence (flak towers) to protect the inner city from Allied bombing.

This last is however a further word-play (on Übermut, thus "congress of arrogance or presumption"), and in fact there was not very much courage needed to set up this building, though citizens' initiatives had been loudly protesting since 2006.

[2] Objectors may call this a scandal, but the building is sure to become the third 'somewhat strange' manmade object in the Augarten, the others being the two battle towers built during the Second World War.