With free entrance and up to 500.000 visitors each year, the Lainzer Tiergarten is a famous excursion destination for runners, walkers and families.

If you’re lucky, boars or deers will pass you way while walking through the Lainzer Tiergarten. Today it’s home to about 900 wild boars, 220 fallow deer, approx. 700 mouflons, and 90 red deer.

I usually start my walk at the Lainzer Tor to the Hermesvilla. From here, you can continue up to the Hubertuswarte and Hirschgstemm, and from there to Pulverstampftor. The walk is about 10 km in long (2 – 2.5 hours) and a bit hilly.

The Lainzer Tiergarten was first created by Emperor Ferdinand I in 1561, when the area was fenced off by a wooden fence, to allow for a private hunting ground.

In 1781, the wooden fence was replaced by a stone wall. After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the hunting grounds became a public nature preserve, and have remained so ever since, with the exception of the time period of 1940 to 1955, when the entire grounds were closed.

Amanita muscaria, commonly known as the fly agaric is a highly poisonous mushroom found all over the Vienna woods.

Walking through the Vienna woods will give you heaps of amazing photo opportunities.

Autumn at the Lainzer Tiergarten in Vienna, Austria.

We live in a little village just outside of western Vienna and are very lucky to have the Viennese woods right in front of our doorstep.

The farmers around Vienna are preparing the fields for winter…

…while the cows enjoy the last sun-rays.

As summer ends and autumn comes, the days get shorter and shorter. This is how the trees “know” to begin getting ready for winter. They begin to shut down their food-making factories. The green chlorophyll disappears from the leaves. And this is why leaves change their colour.