2023-05-07 09:29:07
Ethere is drinking water. And there is Viennese water. Especially pure, clean and tasty, as long-time residents and newcomers proudly tell you again and again. On the website of the city’s tourism authority, a water sommelier living in Vienna raves about its “velvety-soft consistency” and “sweet note”, which it develops on the tongue, only to reveal its “slightly tart character” on the finish.
If you want to know how Vienna got its highly praised water, you have to travel to the mountains and back to the beginning of the 19th century. At that time around 270,000 people lived in Vienna; by the middle of the century there were already more than 700,000. The city grew, water became increasingly scarce, and what little there was – from domestic wells or the Danube Canal – was so polluted that the population was repeatedly plagued by typhoid and cholera epidemics. The bold solution: a line that runs from Vienna to the water-rich mountains to the south-west. The first explosive was fired in 1869. Only four years later, just in time for the world exhibition taking place in Vienna, Emperor Franz Joseph I. ceremonially opened the first Viennese high spring pipeline.
#trail #Viennese #drinking #water