Donau-Auen

Declared in 1996, the park grew directly out of one of the great victories of the Austrian environmental movement: in 1984 the peaceful occupation of the Hainburg woods by thousands of protesters stopped the building of a hydroelectric plant that would have flooded this reach of the Danube, forcing the government to protect the area instead. It is one of the last great stretches of unchannelled Danube floodplain forest surviving in Central Europe.