SCHWARZENBERG WOOD-FLOAT-CHANNEL

Das (s)achte Weltwunder…

In 1774 the forestry engineer Josef Rosenauer presented an ingenious plan to his employer Prince Schwarzenberg. At that time the imperial capital Vienna had been growing fast and its citizens suffered from a lack of firewood.

The main idea of Rosenauer’s concept was concerned with the transporting wood from the Bohemian forest, where abundant resources existed, to Vienna. The major difficulty consisted in getting over the water divide between the Danube and the Vlatava rivers. They started building the 52 km long channel in 1789 and finished it in 1824. The wood-float-channel includes the impressive technical achievements of the tunnel in Hirschbergen (it was built as the first tunnel of Central Europe for civil engineering reasons) and the scarp in Morau. More than 1000 people participated in floating logs to the Große Mühl river and on to the Danube after the snow melted in spring. In the heydey of the channel, which lasted over a hundred of years, more than 8 million cubic metres of wood have been brought to Vienna.