The story of Esterházy Palace begins in the medieval period, when a fortified residence stood on this site under various noble families. The building entered its present chapter in the seventeenth century, when it passed into the hands of the Esterházy princes, one of the wealthiest noble dynasties in the Habsburg lands. Between 1663 and 1672, under Prince Paul I Esterházy, the medieval structure was thoroughly transformed into a generous Baroque palace by the Italian architect Carlo Martino Carlone. A century and a half later, Prince Nicholas II commissioned the French architect Charles de Moreau to add a Neoclassical layer to the building. Moreau's grand plans were never fully realised, however, slowed by the Napoleonic Wars and family finances, and the palace as it stands today is best read as a layered ensemble of Baroque core and partial Neoclassical additions, all wrapped in the ochre yellow that has come to define the Esterházy estates across the region.

The palace has around 256 rooms in total, of which roughly 25 are open to visitors as part of the museum route. Themed tours and free walks explore the state rooms in different combinations, with each itinerary giving its own perspective on the lives of the princes, their guests, and their staff. The interiors preserve original furniture, porcelain, and family portraits across multiple eras of taste, including richly furnished apartments, ceremonial halls, and quiet private spaces that show how the family used the building both for daily life and for the impressive social and political functions that filled its calendar each year.

The undisputed centrepiece of the palace is the Haydn Hall (Haydnsaal), the great ceremonial hall that runs through most of the north wing across three floors. The hall takes its name from the composer Joseph Haydn, who served the Esterházy family for nearly forty years between 1761 and 1790, first as deputy musical director and later as Kapellmeister, and who composed many of his most celebrated works in Eisenstadt. He conducted orchestras here on what would have been a near-nightly basis during his time at court, and the room remains an active concert venue today. The hall is internationally regarded as one of the finest acoustic spaces in the world for classical music. Its ceiling carries an elaborate cycle of frescoes depicting scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, and the walls are richly worked in stucco, with the result that the Haydn Hall reads at once as a celebration of family power and as a deliberate architectural setting for the music that gave Esterházy court life its distinctive character.

A separate exhibition titled Haydn Explosive, set within the palace itself, presents some of the composer's personal belongings, original musical instruments, and the wider story of his life at court. Other parts of the palace are devoted to the broader history of the Esterházy family, with its collections of art, ceremonial objects, and historical documents brought together in newly conceived exhibitions across the year. A separate small Wine Museum on the palace grounds traces the long tradition of viticulture in Burgenland, a region whose Pannonian climate has long made it one of Austria's most distinctive wine landscapes. The surrounding Palace Park opens out at the back of the building into a generous landscape garden, with shaded paths, fountains, the elegant Orangery, and the small Neoclassical Leopoldine Temple, all reachable on foot from the main palace courtyard.

The wider Palace Quarter continues the experience beyond the main building. The former court stables across the square have been converted into the Henrici restaurant, serving Levantine cuisine with a new Pannonian twist, while the neighbouring Selektion Vinothek Burgenland offers a tasting selection of the leading wines of the region. Every September, the HERBSTGOLD Festival takes over the Haydn Hall and the surrounding palace spaces for around two weeks, combining classical music, jazz, and Balkan and Roma traditions with regional food and wine. The palace is today owned and managed by the private Esterházy Foundation, set up by the late Princess Melinda Esterházy, herself a former Hungarian prima ballerina, before her death in 2014. Her vision was to keep the palace in active cultural use rather than turn it into a static museum, and the result is that the building still functions, three and a half centuries after the Baroque rebuilding began, as the working cultural heart of Eisenstadt and of the entire Esterházy estate.

Eisenstadt's main railway station sits just under a kilometre from the centre of the old town, with Esterházy Palace, the palace park, the old town squares, and the Bergkirche church reachable on foot or by bike in well under fifteen minutes along largely flat, well-signposted streets. The historic centre is compact, mostly pedestrianised, and easy to navigate on foot once you arrive, with the palace, Henrici restaurant, Selektion Vinothek, and the rest of the Palace Quarter all clustered around Esterházyplatz. Cycling infrastructure in and around the town is good, and the surrounding countryside is laced with marked cycle paths through vineyards and along the foothills of the Leitha Hills, making longer rides easy to extend. Bike racks are available at the station for shorter stops. For onward travel, the same line connects back toward Vienna and the wider Danube region, so Esterházy Palace works equally well as a half-day excursion or as an overnight detour from the EuroVelo 6.