informational 4 min read
The Lipizzaner Museum in Vienna Has Closed
Updated September 18, 2026
The Lipizzaner Museum in the Stallburg is closed, and has been for years. If you have found a guidebook, a listings site or a tour description that still sends you there, it is out of date.
We are stating this plainly because the searches have not stopped, and arriving at the Reitschulgasse to find no museum is a wasted half hour in a city where half hours are expensive.
What was there
A museum in the Stallburg — the Renaissance building between Josefsplatz and Michaelerplatz where the Lipizzaner stallions are stabled — covering the horses, the school and the breed. Its best feature was a set of windows looking directly into the stables.
It is described as closed on the Stallburg’s Wikipedia entry, and it appears nowhere on the Spanish Riding School’s own website. We checked the school’s site on 18 September 2026: there is no Lipizzaner Museum page in Vienna, no admission price and no opening hours. The only museum the school lists anywhere is in Styria.
Where the museum went
To Piber. The Lipizzaner Stud at Piber, near Köflach in Styria, opened an exhibition called “Follow the Herd” in September 2021. It covers Lipizzaner breeding and care, includes original nineteenth-century exhibits and a true-to-scale model of the Spanish Riding School, and is open throughout the stud’s visiting hours — including the midday rest between 12:00 and 13:00, when the horses are in their stables and there is otherwise nothing to see.
Piber is the stud that supplies Vienna, so the move makes sense institutionally. It is also about two and a half hours from Vienna, which makes it an Austrian holiday destination rather than a Hofburg substitute.
What to do instead
Three options, in the order we would take them.
The guided tour of the Spanish Riding School, from EUR 24 for 55 minutes. This is the closest thing to what the museum offered and it is better: a guide takes you into the Winter Riding School and the Stallburg itself, rather than showing you the stables through glass. Photography is not permitted and children under three are not admitted.
The morning exercise, from EUR 17. An hour watching the stallions being schooled. It is training rather than a show, which is why its rating is the lowest of the school’s products, but for anyone who came to Vienna to see Lipizzaners it is the cheapest way to see them working.
The Stallburg courtyard, free. From Reitschulgasse you can look into the yard of the Stallburg, with its wrought-iron fountain of 1675. It costs nothing, takes two minutes, and it is the building the museum was inside.
One more thing worth knowing
The stallions are not in Vienna all year. All sixty-eight go to the summer stables at Heldenberg in Lower Austria for seven weeks in July and August, where they are hacked in the forest rather than schooled. If your trip falls in high summer, check the school’s calendar before you build a day around the horses — the guided tour still runs, but there may be nothing in the stalls.