Look, we got to keep it one hundred: this story is wild. We got an 83-year-old billionaire car mogul named Wolfgang Porsche who really thought he could just buy up a historic mountain, dig his own personal highway through it, and not have anyone say a word. But the neighborhood wasn't having it, and now he’s forced to sell his luxury estate after the whole city came for his neck over what they called a "tunnel for one."

Let’s talk about the kind of money we’re dealing with here. Back in 2020, this man Porsche dropped a massive €8.4 million (that’s about £7.2 million) on a 12-room mansion on the edge of Salzburg called the Paschinger Schlössl. Now, regular folks in the city are out here struggling to pay rent and find a decent place to live because of a serious housing shortage. But instead of reading the room, Porsche decided last autumn to get permission for a €10 million private access road. He wanted to blast a 500-meter tunnel straight through the limestone hill of Kapuzinerberg, linking a public parking lot in the city center straight to his own private underground garage so he could park eight of his luxury whips.

The sheer audacity of trying to build a personal highway in a city where people can barely afford groceries got the community heated. And it’s not just about the traffic—it’s about the culture. This mansion used to be the home of Stefan Zweig, a legendary Jewish writer who got run out of the city by the Austro-fascist regime back in 1934. Zweig’s writing actually inspired that movie The Grand Budapest Hotel. In his own memoirs, Zweig wrote that the best part of the house was that it was totally "inaccessible to cars" and that you had to walk up more than a hundred steps to get to it. So Porsche coming in with a €10 million drill to bypass the stairs was a direct slap in the face to the history of the block.

The streets erupted. People started hanging banners all over Salzburg, yelling "A city for everyone instead of a tunnel for one." When you got families getting squeezed by extortionate rents, watching an ultra-rich dude carve up a protected hill for his personal convenience is the ultimate disrespect. The backlash got so loud and so hot that Porsche had to fall back. He did a complete U-turn and put the whole 12-room estate back on the market.

But don't think the system didn't help him out first. The city authorities let Porsche buy this highly controversial planning permission for a measly €48,000 fee. And here is the kicker: that permit doesn't disappear just because Porsche is selling. It’s fully transferable to whoever buys the house next, and it’s valid all the way until the end of 2028. So some other multi-millionaire could easily slide in, buy the property, and start drilling that same tunnel if they move fast enough.