BURGENLAND - Geography and history
This predominantly German-speaking, west Hungarian region became part of Austria in 1921 and has since been a Bundesland in its own right. It has an area of 3 966 km2 which includes two chartered cities, the capital Eisenstadt and Rust (on the Neusiedler See) and seven political districts. In total, there are 171 municipalities. It has international borders with Slovak Republic, Hungary and Slovenia and is also bounded by the Bundesländer Niederösterreich and Steiermark.
Burgenland for the most part borders the Hungarian Plain and is divided into three zones by Alpine foothills. In the north it is mainly flat whilst central and southern areas are largely hilly. Thanks to the warm, dry Pannonian climate, Burgenland has 3,9% of its area under vines, with agriculture and horticulture taking up 53.4% and forest 30.2% of the land.
Until recently Burgenland was mainly agricultural, but it is now rapidly opening up to tourism around the Neusiedler See. The most important international traffic routes lead to Hungary, with one main road running from north to south. Croatian- and Hungarian-speaking minorities have settled in Burgenland.
Carefully-cultivated landscape
The Burgenland countryside is largely cultivated, with well-maintained small farms and narrow strip fields, but with a great deal of new development in towns and villages. There is little industry. Burgenland has not, like other areas of Austria, been spoilt by indiscriminate development: although villages and market towns with a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants have expanded since the 19th century, they have done so close to the old centres of the settlements rather than scattered around piecemeal in a landscape rendered extremely fragmented by the subdivision of holdings. The area around the Neusiedler See, a shallow, steppe lake, and the Seewinkel area adjoining it to the east, which has salt ponds and a puszta landscape, are unique in Austria. Both are favourite areas for tourists.
A disadvantage of this well-maintained landscape with its pattern of village settlements is the north-south orientation of the Land, which is 200 km long but very narrow. Apart from one road running north to south, all the main road and rail connections cross Burgenland from east to west, and the volume of traffic on the road (now a motorway) to Hungary in the northern part of the Land has shot up since 1989.
Vineyards and arable land predominate
Burgenland has a population density of 70 inhabitants per km2. Some 10% of those employed in Burgenland still work in agriculture, hunting, forestry or fishing. Per capita GDP is only 73% of the EU average.
The north is the most favored of the three areas. It has the capital, Eisenstadt (11 334 inhabitants at the population census of 15 May 2001) and, around the Neusiedler See, Austria's most extensive wine-growing area and the region's most important tourist area. Many field crops are grown, and with Vienna so close, most commuters can return home every evening.
In central Burgenland there are large areas of vineyards alongside arable land and in the south arable farming predominates, frequently as a subsidiary activity. In both areas, GDP per capita was in 2000 only just over 60% of the EU average.
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