Rosa Lila Villa

The Rosa Lila Villa ("Pink Lilac Villa") is Austria's central LGBTQ+ community centre. On 25 June 1982 a group of gay-and-lesbian activists from HOSI Wien and the Frauenzentrum squatted a vacant three-storey Wilhelminian townhouse at Linke Wienzeile 102 in the 6th District; two years of negotiation with the City of Vienna produced a formal lease in 1984, and the collective has operated from the building continuously ever since. The Villa hosts three separate collectives sharing the same building: Türkis Rosa Lila Tipp (the LGBTQ+ counselling collective), the Frauen*abteilung (women's and lesbian floor), and the Regenbogen café-and-bar on the ground floor. Programming across the four floors includes trans peer groups, refugee support (particularly for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers from post-Yugoslav and post-Soviet countries), Sunday brunches, monthly parties, and rotating exhibitions in the ground-floor gallery. The building itself is painted an unmissable pink-lilac — a colour chosen in the 1982 occupation to identify the building from the tram line running past the front door — and carries a permanent rainbow flag from the second-floor balcony. The exterior remains one of Vienna's most-photographed queer landmarks and appears in every Austrian queer-history overview. Open daily; specific programming hours vary. Pilgramgasse U-Bahn is two minutes' walk. Free to visit the café and ground-floor exhibition; counselling by appointment. Combine with the Naschmarkt (100 metres west) for a Vienna 6th District queer-heritage afternoon.