Carinthia's lakeside capital — the Wörthersee and Austria's sunshine corner
Klagenfurt am Wörthersee is the capital of Austria's Carinthia region — a handsome Baroque city on the shores of the Wörthersee, one of Austria's warmest swimming lakes. The old town is an elegant grid of Renaissance and Baroque palaces built by the Habsburgs after the town was granted to them in 1518, and the Lindwurmbrunnen (Dragon Fountain) in the main square — a 1590 dragon sculpted from a real woolly rhinoceros skull found nearby — is one of Austria's most distinctive landmarks. The area is Austria's sunniest region, with over 2,000 sunshine hours per year.
Klagenfurt was established as a market town in 1199 and acquired by the Habsburgs in 1518, who made it the capital of the Duchy of Carinthia. The city's Renaissance grid layout, dating from a rebuild after a 1514 fire, is intact. Carinthia was historically disputed between Austria and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) — a 1920 plebiscite kept it Austrian. The city is the birthplace of the writer Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities) and has a notable Slovenian-speaking minority.