Fertö / Neusiedlersee Cultural Landscape

Shallow, reed-fringed and warmed by a steppe climate, the Fertö/Neusiedler Lake is the westernmost of Eurasia's great steppe lakes, and people have settled around it for eight thousand years. Lakeside villages with their distinctive rural architecture and palaces of the 18th and 19th centuries — Esterháza among them — record a long meeting of cultures on the Austro-Hungarian border. UNESCO inscribed the cross-border cultural landscape in 2001.