Eisenstadt, Austria

Evergreen city guide with quick facts, travel, business, and culture.

AustriaBurgenland

Overview

Eisenstadt is the capital of Burgenland, Austria's easternmost state — one of the smallest state capitals in Europe at barely 14,000 inhabitants, set 50 km south-east of Vienna in the wine country at the northern edge of the Pannonian plain. The town is best known as the seat of the Esterházy princes and the workplace of Joseph Haydn, who served as their Kapellmeister for almost 30 years.

Haydn and Classical Music

Schloss Esterházy, the Haydnsaal, the Haydn-Haus museum and the annual Eisenstadt Haydn Festival.

Esterházy Heritage

Three centuries of Esterházy court life and the Habsburg–Hungarian story told through one palace.

Burgenland Wine Country

Blaufränkisch reds and Neusiedl sweet wines in a network of cellar villages within twenty minutes of the centre.

Lake Neusiedl Cycling and Birdwatching

UNESCO steppe lake on the doorstep with a continuous cycle ring, reedbed reserves and wide-water sailing.

Jewish Heritage Quarter

The Judengasse, the Wertheimer Synagogue and the Austrian Jewish Museum in the surviving Sheva Kehillot lane.
Travel Overview

Eisenstadt is one of Europe's smaller state capitals — barely 14,000 inhabitants — and a compact summary of Burgenland's mixed German, Hungarian and Croatian heritage. The town sits at the eastern foot of the Leitha range, 50 kilometres south-east of Vienna, where the Alpine landscape gives way to the flat Pannonian plain. The defining building is Schloss Esterházy, the yellow baroque palace of the Esterházy princes whose court Joseph Haydn served as Kapellmeister for almost 30 years; the Haydnsaal inside the palace is still one of the world's celebrated chamber-music halls. Around it the centre runs from the cobbled Hauptstraße to the historic Judengasse — for centuries one of the most important Jewish communities in Central Europe — and out into vineyards. Lake Neusiedl, the steppe-edge lake shared with Hungary and a UNESCO World Heritage site, is twenty minutes away.

Discover Eisenstadt

The yellow baroque Schloss Esterházy is Eisenstadt's defining building and the centre of its musical heritage. The Haydnsaal — where the composer directed the prince's orchestra for nearly three decades — remains a working concert hall with one of the most admired chamber-music acoustics in Europe. The palace state rooms, the Esterházy treasury and changing exhibitions on the family's three-century role in Hungarian and Habsburg history fill a thorough morning.

Diplomatic missions in Eisenstadt

3 embassies based in this city, grouped by region.