Lindwurm Fountain

Why go

The Lindwurm Fountain stands on the Neuer Platz in the centre of Klagenfurt. The city's sights page says the winged dragon, the Lindwurm, is Klagenfurt's emblem and heraldic animal, already shown on the oldest surviving city seal of 1287, and that in 1583 the Carinthian estates ordered a monument to it, carved from a single block of chlorite schist from the Kreuzbergl. The same page says the sculptor, long thought to be Ulrich Vogelsang, was probably an unknown master, that the statue is said to have been hauled to the Neuer Platz in 1593, and that it received its fountain, a wrought-iron grille and a statue of its legendary slayer Hercules by Michael Hönel only in 1636. The city tourism board's account agrees that the fountain was added in the 17th century. The record is the fountain, not the Neuer Platz around it.