Wiener Riesenrad

The Riesenrad went up in 1897 for the fiftieth anniversary of Franz Joseph’s reign, and at 64.75 metres it was then the tallest wheel of its kind in the world. Very little about it has been modernised away. You step into a wooden cabin — 5.4 metres long, six windows down each side, room for up to fifteen people — and the wheel lifts you at 2.7 kilometres an hour, the pace of an unhurried walk. Nobody straps you in. One turn takes twelve to fifteen minutes, long enough to place everything: the Wurstelprater directly below, the Hauptallee running dead straight into the trees, the Danube off to the north-east and the old city low and wide to the west.

It nearly wasn’t here

A demolition permit was granted in 1916, and only a lack of money stopped it being used. In 1944 fire destroyed almost the whole wheel and left the steel frame standing. Rebuilding began in 1945, at the same time as St Stephen’s Cathedral, the State Opera and the Burgtheater, and the Riesenrad turned again in 1947 — with fifteen cabins instead of the original thirty, and four windows each instead of six, on grounds of cost. The wide gaps around the rim are the visible scar of that, and the reason the wheel looks the way it does. Six-window cabins came back in 2016.

The film, and the museum

Orson Welles’s Harry Lime meets Holly Martins in a cabin here in The Third Man, shot in Vienna in 1948. The wheel is real; the cabin interior was built in a London studio, because the camera would not fit inside a real one. It turns up again in The Living Daylights and Before Sunrise. Eight cabins lost after the war were recovered in 2002 and now stand at the foot of the wheel as the Panorama Museum, each staged as a scene from the city’s past — Roman Vindobona, Sobieski’s cavalry on the Prater meadows, Joseph II throwing the imperial hunting ground open to the public in 1766, the World Exposition of 1873. It comes with the ride.

Go at dusk

The ride is short, so pick the hour when the light does the work. Through the summer the wheel runs until a quarter to midnight, and a cabin that goes up in daylight comes down over a lit city. Your ticket is not tied to a time slot, so you can wait for the sky rather than for a booking. A cabin can also be hired outright from half an hour upwards, with courses served each time it comes back down to the platform.