Tour · Klagenfurt · fountain
Lindwurmbrunnen
A snarling, six-ton stone dragon rears over Neuer Platz, the winged Lindwurm that has been Klagenfurt's proud city symbol for more than four centuries.
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The Lindwurmbrunnen stands at the centre of Neuer Platz as the beating heart of Klagenfurt and the emblem stamped on the city's coat of arms. Carved around 1590 from a single block of greenish chlorite slate quarried at the nearby Kreuzbergl, the dragon weighs roughly six tons and is traditionally credited to the sculptor Ulrich Vogelsang, though many historians now suspect an unknown master. The beast retells the founding legend of Klagenfurt, in which a winged serpent haunted the marshes of the River Glan, flooding the crossings and devouring travellers until brave young men baited it with a bull hung from a chain and slew it. What makes the monument extraordinary is its head, sculpted from the fossil skull of an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros discovered in 1335 in a nearby quarry, making the Lindwurm one of the earliest known reconstructions of an extinct animal. The muscular figure of Hercules, club raised to strike, was added in 1636 to complete the scene of the dragon's defeat, and the fountain basin around them turns the whole legend into a living centrepiece of the square.
Fatti principali
- 6 tons — The dragon was carved from a single block of chlorite slate
- 1335 year — The Ice Age rhinoceros skull that modelled its head was found
- 300 men — Young men in white hauled the statue to Neuer Platz in 1593
📍 Neuer Platz, 9020, Klagenfurt am Wörthersee