The Most Beautiful Palaces in the World

91 places in 35 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Schönbrunn Palace

   Schloss Schönbrunn

   Austria · 4.3 km from Vienna48.185° N 16.312° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Schönbrunn was the summer residence of the Habsburgs, and it grew from a hunting ground. Emperor Maximilian II bought the floodplain of the Wien river in 1569 and stocked it with game; Eleonora Gonzaga added a palace in the 1640s, and the name, from a "beautiful spring" whose water was drunk at court, first appears in 1642. The palace visitors see today is essentially the one remodelled in the 1740s and 1750s for Empress Maria Theresa, who had received the estate as a wedding gift and turned it into the centre of court life. Its 1,441 rooms make it one of the great Baroque residences of Europe.

   Did you know? In 1786 the Orangery hosted an imperial musical duel: Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor and Salieri's Prima la musica e poi le parole were performed at opposite ends of the hall.

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2. 02 Dolmabahçe Palace

   Turkey · 3.3 km from Istanbul41.039° N 29.002° E

   

   Dolmabahçe Palace lines the European shore of the Bosphorus in Istanbul, a long white facade of columns and carved stone reflected in the water. Its name means "filled-in garden": the site was once a bay where the Ottoman fleet anchored, reclaimed in the eighteenth century as an imperial garden. Sultan Abdülmecid I, finding the medieval Topkapı Palace too old-fashioned beside the courts of Europe, had it built between 1843 and 1853, to designs by Garabet Balyan and his son Nigoğayos of the Armenian Balyan family of court architects. The cost was enormous and strained the empire's finances, which slid towards default in 1875.

   Did you know? The palace holds 285 rooms, 46 halls, six hammams and 68 toilets, spread over roughly 45,000 square metres.

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3. 03 Grand Palace

   Thailand · 2.5 km from Bangkok13.750° N 100.492° E

   

   The Grand Palace in Bangkok is not one building but a walled city of them: throne halls, pavilions, gates and a royal chapel spread over about 218,000 square metres on the bank of the Chao Phraya, gilded spires and roofs of green and orange tile rising within four walls. It was founded on 6 May 1782 by King Rama I, the first of the Chakri dynasty, when he moved his capital across the river from Thonburi to Bangkok; its plan deliberately copied the royal palace of Ayutthaya, and many of its bricks were ferried downriver from the ruins of that sacked city. The kings lived here until the early twentieth century, and the palace is still used for royal ceremonies — the coronation of King Rama X in 2019 took place in the Phaisan Thaksin hall.

   Did you know? The Inner Court was reserved for the king and his consorts, whom ordinary people called the forbidden women, and at times housed nearly 3,000 residents.

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4. 04 Diocletian's Palace

   Dioklecijanova palača

   Croatia · 2.9 km from Split43.508° N 16.438° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Diocletian, the emperor who divided power among four rulers and then did something rare for a Roman emperor — abdicated, in 305 — chose a peninsula on the Dalmatian coast for his retirement, a few kilometres from Salona, the provincial capital. The residence he built there from around 295 is less a palace than a fortified town: an irregular rectangle roughly 215 by 175 metres, laid out like a legionary camp, with towers along its three landward walls and an arcaded gallery on the side facing the sea. Half of it housed the emperor, the rest his garrison and servants. Most of the white stone came from the island of Brač; granite columns and a dozen sphinxes were shipped from Egypt.

   Did you know? According to ancient sources, when asked to return to power Diocletian replied that anyone who saw the cabbages he grew would never suggest it.

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5. 05 Palace of the Shirvanshahs

   Azerbaijan · 4.1 km from Baku40.366° N 49.833° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Palace of the Shirvanshahs crowns the highest point of Baku's walled Old City, a compact ensemble of stone buildings from the fifteenth century. The Shirvanshahs were the long-lived dynasty of Shirvan, and under Ibrahim I they moved their capital to Baku after an earthquake devastated their old seat at Shamakhi. Building on the hill is traditionally dated from 1411; inscriptions on the family tomb and on the minaret of the palace mosque name his son Khalilullah I and give dates in the 1430s and 1440s.

   Did you know? The main palace building originally had 52 rooms, 27 on the ground floor and 25 above, linked by three narrow spiral staircases.

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6. 06 Palace of Versailles

   Château de Versailles

   France · 1.1 km from Versailles48.805° N 2.120° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Versailles began as a small brick-and-stone hunting lodge that Louis XIII built in 1623 amid marshes southwest of Paris, a building contemporaries mocked as a house of cards. His son turned it into the stage set of absolute monarchy. Louis XIV, impressed by the château and gardens of his finance minister Nicolas Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte, where he was a guest on 17 August 1661, set the same team, the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the garden designer André Le Nôtre to work, and in 1678 Jules Hardouin-Mansart took over as first architect. From 6 May 1682 until 6 October 1789 the king, the court and the government lived here permanently, apart from the Regency years. The result covers about 63,000 square metres and some 2,300 rooms.

   Did you know? Water was too scarce to run every fountain at once, so fountaineers whistled to each other as the king approached and shut each one off after he passed.

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7. 07 Sanssouci Palace

   Schloss Sanssouci

   Germany · 2.2 km from Potsdam52.403° N 13.039° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The name is the whole design brief: "sans souci," without a care, and Frederick the Great built exactly that — a single-storey retreat on a terraced vineyard hillside outside Potsdam, deliberately smaller and more intimate than the Baroque grandeur of Versailles it's often compared to. Built between 1745 and 1747 with Frederick's own close involvement alongside architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, it's less a statement of power than an escape from one — a place for a king who spent most of his reign at war to be, for stretches at a time, simply a man with a garden. The terraces themselves aren't just ornamental: glazed niches built into the vineyard slope trapped heat so figs and grapes could ripen in Prussia's cold climate, a small agricultural experiment folded into a pleasure garden.

   Did you know? The fountains Frederick planned for his gardens never worked in his lifetime; even with calculations by the mathematician Euler, the pumps failed and the project was abandoned in 1780.

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8. 08 Quinta da Regaleira

   Portugal · 23.1 km from Lisbon38.796° N 9.396° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Quinta da Regaleira is the most theatrical of Sintra's romantic estates — a four-hectare hillside of palace, chapel, woods, grottoes and shafts built as a riddle in stone. Its creator was António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro, a Brazilian-born Portuguese magnate nicknamed "Monteiro the Millionaire", who bought the land from the Viscountess of Regaleira's family in 1892 and, with the Italian architect and stage designer Luigi Manini, rebuilt it between 1904 and 1910. Manini drew on Roman, Gothic, Renaissance and above all Manueline forms, the exuberant Portuguese late Gothic of the Age of Discoveries, and packed the estate with emblems that visitors still argue over: alchemy, Freemasonry, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, Dante.

   Did you know? Monteiro's library of about 30,000 volumes, weighing some 15 tonnes, was sold after his death and bought by the US Library of Congress between 1927 and 1929.

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9. 09 Alhambra

   Spain · 1.3 km from Granada37.176° N 3.588° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The name comes from the Arabic for "the red one" — al-qal'a al-hamra, the red fortress — most likely a reference to the reddish clay used in its outer walls, visible at dusk when the whole hilltop seems to glow. It began modestly: Muhammad I, founder of the Nasrid dynasty, started fortifying the site in the mid-13th century as the last independent Muslim kingdom in Iberia carved out a foothold at Granada while the rest of al-Andalus fell to Christian reconquest around it. What Muhammad I built was closer to a citadel than a palace. The building that draws people today — the dense sequence of courtyards, halls and gardens known as the Nasrid Palaces — is largely the work of two later rulers, Yusuf I and his son Muhammad V, across the 14th century, by which point Granada had settled into two and a half centuries of relative stability that let its rulers build rather than just defend.

   Did you know? Retreating from Granada in 1812, Napoleon's troops tried to blow up the whole Alhambra; eight towers fell before a Spanish soldier, José García, cut the remaining fuses.

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10. 10 Forbidden City

    People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    For almost five centuries the Forbidden City was the physical centre of the Chinese state. The Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty began it in 1406, after moving the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, and the complex was ready by 1420; from then until 1912 twenty-four emperors, fourteen Ming and ten Qing, lived and ruled here. The name in Chinese, Zijincheng, joins the idea of prohibition with the colour purple, a reference to the Pole Star around which heaven was believed to turn, as the empire turned around the emperor. Ordinary people could not enter. After Puyi's abdication he was allowed to remain in the inner palaces until 1924, and the following year the complex opened as the Palace Museum.

    Did you know? The legend of 9,999 rooms is not borne out by surveys, which count about 8,886 bays of rooms.

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11. 11 Nesvizh Castle

    Нясвіжскі палацава-паркавы комплекс

    Belarus53.223° N 26.692° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Nesvizh Castle was the principal seat of the Radziwiłłs, the wealthiest magnate family of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and it is the grandest aristocratic residence surviving in Belarus. Its yellow Baroque ranges close around a courtyard entered through a gatehouse tower, with ponds and landscaped parkland around it. Together with the Corpus Christi Church in the town it was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2005, recognised for its influence on the architecture of Central and Eastern Europe.

    Did you know? Nesvizh had its own cannon foundry, the first in Belarus, which cast its first series of guns in 1576.

    More about Nesvizh Castle →

12. 12 Town Hall of Bremen

    Bremer Rathaus

    Germany · 0.7 km from Bremen53.076° N 8.808° E

    

    Bremen's Town Hall is a Gothic hall in a Renaissance costume. Its long brick body, raised between 1405 and 1410 when the Hanseatic city was at the height of its wealth, received two centuries later one of the most extravagant facades in northern Germany: a towering central bay of slender columns, tall windows and a richly carved gable in the Flemish manner, flanked by smaller gables and balustrades heavy with reliefs. It is one of the great monuments of both Brick Gothic and the Weser Renaissance, and in 2004 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with the Roland statue in front of it, as a testimony to the civic self-government of the cities of the Holy Roman Empire.

    Did you know? The Gothic town hall is a simple rectangular block of two storeys, about 41.5 metres long and 15.8 metres wide.

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13. 13 Potala Palace

    People's Republic of China · 2.2 km from Lhasa29.658° N 91.117° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The hill the palace stands on has been sacred longer than the palace itself. Tradition holds that in 637, Songtsen Gampo — the Tibetan king credited with unifying the plateau — built the first palace on this outcrop, known as Marpo Ri, or the Red Hill, to mark his marriage to the Chinese princess Wencheng. That original structure didn't survive: it was destroyed during the civil conflict that broke apart the Tibetan Tubo kingdom in the 9th century, and the hill sat largely bare of major construction for the better part of eight centuries.

    Did you know? Copper was poured into the foundations to help the palace withstand earthquakes, and its sloping walls are about 5 metres thick at the base.

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14. 14 Imperial City of Hue

    Vietnam · 0.2 km from Huế16.469° N 107.578° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    When Nguyễn Phúc Ánh unified Vietnam in 1802 and took the name Gia Long, he chose Huế, the old seat of his family, as the capital, and set about building a court on the model of Beijing's Forbidden City inside a European-style fortress. The result is three enclosures, one inside the other, on the north bank of the Perfume River. The outer citadel, a Vauban-style rampart nearly 10 km round with a moat, was begun in 1805 and finished in 1832 under Minh Mạng. Within it lies the Imperial City, a square about 600 m a side behind its own wall and moat, and within that again the Purple Forbidden City, reserved for the emperor and his household. Unlike Beijing, the whole complex faces southeast towards the river rather than due south, following the advice of geomancers.

    Did you know? On the night of 5 July 1885, after a failed attack on the French, Emperor Hàm Nghi was spirited out of the citadel to lead a guerrilla resistance.

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15. 15 Hospital de Sant Pau

    Hospital de la Santa Cruz y San Pablo

    Spain · 3.1 km from Barcelona41.413° N 2.174° E

    

    Domes covered in coloured ceramic, brick pavilions trimmed with mosaic and stone sculpture, gardens laid out along broad avenues: the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau is the largest ensemble of Catalan Modernisme, and it was built to care for the sick. Its architect, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, believed patients would recover better among trees, light and beauty than in closed wards, and he designed a garden city of separate pavilions rather than a single block. Together with his Palau de la Música Catalana, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997.

    Did you know? Domènech set the hospital's streets deliberately out of line with Barcelona's Eixample grid, a gesture of his open opposition to Ildefons Cerdà's plan.

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16. 16 Neuschwanstein Castle

    Schloss Neuschwanstein

    Germany47.557° N 10.749° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The name suggests a medieval stronghold; the building is closer to a 19th-century stage set with plumbing. Ludwig II commissioned it in 1868, right after the Austro-Prussian War had stripped Bavaria of real independence and left him a king with a crown but shrinking power — and what he built instead of political influence was a retreat modelled on the operas of Richard Wagner, whom he'd idolised since adolescence. Ludwig sketched the fantasy in his own hand; it fell to the architect Georg von Dollmann to turn those sketches into working drawings and actual stone. The Singers' Hall and Throne Room aren't generic medieval fantasy; they're built around scenes from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, with Ludwig effectively commissioning a piece of architecture as an extension of Wagner's stage designs.

    Did you know? Ludwig II spent only 172 days in the palace he had dreamed of, and it was called New Hohenschwangau until after his death.

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17. 17 Doge's Palace

    Palazzo Ducale

    Italy · 0.7 km from Venice45.434° N 12.340° E

    

    Seen from the lagoon, the Doge's Palace does something no textbook building should: its heavy, nearly solid upper storey sits on two tiers of delicate Gothic arcades, as if the palace were balanced on lace. That inversion is the signature of Venetian Gothic, and this is its grandest example. For nearly a thousand years the palace was the seat of the Doge and the government of the Republic of Venice, holding council chambers, law courts, offices and prisons as well as the Doge's own apartments.

    Did you know? The only art theft from the palace came in 1991, when a thief hid in a prison cell after a tour and crossed the Bridge of Sighs at night.

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18. 18 Leuven Town Hall

    Stadhuis van Leuven

    Belgium · 26.5 km from Brussels50.879° N 4.701° E

    

    Leuven Town Hall is late Gothic carried almost to the point of lace. Every surface of its three storeys facing the Grote Markt is worked with pointed windows, canopied niches and carved corbels, a parapet runs along the top, and above it a steep roof bristles with four tiers of dormers between slender octagonal turrets at the corners. Built between 1439 and 1469, it is one of the finest examples of the Brabantine Gothic style, and it faces the great Gothic church of St Peter across the square, so that the two buildings together form the centre of the old university city.

    Did you know? Victor Hugo visited in 1852 and praised the building as fireworks turned to stone, and his enthusiasm helped push forward the project to fill its niches.

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19. 19 Yonghe Temple

    People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Beijing39.947° N 116.411° E

    

    The tallest figure in Yonghe Temple, the Lama Temple of Beijing, rises 18 metres under the roof of the last great hall: a standing Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, carved from one trunk of white sandalwood, with roughly another eight metres of the same log sunk into the ground to hold it upright. It closes a sequence of five great halls strung along a north–south axis almost half a kilometre long, each set in its own courtyard and each a little more richly furnished than the last. Bronze Buddhas of past, present and future fill the main hall, and a hill of five hundred arhats worked in red sandalwood shares a hall with a large image of Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school to which the monastery still belongs.

    Did you know? The Maitreya in the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses stands 18 m tall and is carved from a single trunk of white sandalwood.

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20. 20 Hawa Mahal

    India · 1.9 km from Jaipur26.924° N 75.827° E

    

    The Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, is in effect a stone screen five storeys high. Built in 1799 by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh, grandson of Jaipur's founder Jai Singh II, and designed by Lal Chand Ustad, it rises about 15 metres above a busy street in the walled old city. What faces the street is not the front of a palace but the back of a wing of the zenana, the women's quarters of the City Palace. Its purpose was to let the women of the court watch processions and street life below without being seen.

    Did you know? Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh was a devoted follower of Krishna, and the tiered façade is traditionally said to imitate the god's crown.

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21. 21 Beiteddine Palace

    Lebanon · 15.8 km from Baabda33.696° N 35.580° E

    

    Beiteddine Palace spreads across a ridge in the Chouf mountains, a complex of courtyards, arcades and fountains that shows the Lebanese princely architecture of the early 19th century at its most refined. Emir Bashir Shihab II, who ruled Mount Lebanon for half a century, began it in 1788 on the site of a former Druze hermitage and kept building until about 1818. The name means "house of faith". By 1811 Bashir had moved the seat of his emirate here, and a canal was cut to bring water from the Safa River to the palace.

    Did you know? According to legend, Emir Bashir II had the palace architect's hands cut off so that he could never build anything to rival it.

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22. 22 Topkapı Palace

    Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.013° N 28.984° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    For almost four centuries the Ottoman Empire was governed from a headland at the very tip of old Istanbul. Mehmed II began Topkapı Palace in 1459, a few years after taking Constantinople, on Seraglio Point, where the Golden Horn opens into the Bosphorus and both meet the Sea of Marmara. The site was chosen for exactly what still stuns visitors: from the terraces the view sweeps across water on three sides, with ships moving between two continents. The sultans lived and ruled here until the court moved to the new Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosphorus in the mid-19th century, and in 1924, after the end of the empire, the palace became a museum.

    Did you know? The palace stands on the site of the acropolis of ancient Byzantion, and parts of its outer walls date back to Byzantine times.

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23. 23 Ali Qapu

    Iran · 5.4 km from Isfahan32.657° N 51.677° E

    

    Ali Qapu closes the western side of Isfahan's great square, Naqsh-e Jahan, directly facing the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque across the open ground. The name joins an Arabic word for "exalted" with a Turkic word for "gate" — the Lofty Gate — because the building was literally the ceremonial entrance to the royal quarter behind it. It rose in the early seventeenth century at the command of Shah Abbas the Great, who moved the Safavid capital to Isfahan in 1598 and set about rebuilding the city around this vast rectangle, some 560 by 160 metres.

    Did you know? Shah Abbas is said to have first celebrated Nowruz, the Persian New Year, at Ali Qapu in 1597.

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24. 24 Peleș Castle

    Romania · 32.4 km from Brașov45.360° N 25.543° E

    

    Peleș Castle rises out of the forest above Sinaia, in the Prahova valley of the southern Carpathians, like a Bavarian fairy-tale castle set down in Romania: steep roofs, painted half-timbering, pinnacles and a main tower 66 metres high against the mountains. It was built for King Carol I, a Hohenzollern prince under whose reign Romania won its independence, and who fell for this valley on his first visit in 1866. The foundation stone was laid in 1873; the German architect Johannes Schultz won the commission after Carol rejected three designs as unoriginal copies of Western palaces, Carol Benesch worked on the building, and the Czech architect Karel Liman added the towers between 1893 and 1914.

    Did you know? The decoration of the castle's 60-seat theatre is credited to the young Gustav Klimt and his colleague Franz Matsch.

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25. 25 Golestan Palace

    Iran · 0.7 km from Tehran35.680° N 51.420° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Golestan, the "Palace of Flowers", is what remains of the walled citadel around which Tehran grew into a capital. Its core goes back to the Safavid period, when Shah Tahmasp I built a fortified enclosure here in the sixteenth century and Abbas the Great later added a garden. Karim Khan Zand reworked it in the eighteenth century, but the complex as it looks today is essentially Qajar: Agha Mohammad Khan made Tehran his seat at the end of the 1700s, and the palace became the dynasty's residence and stage for more than a century. Much of the present fabric dates from a rebuilding completed in 1865 under the architect Haji Abol-Hasan Mimar Navai. UNESCO listed the ensemble in 2013.

    Did you know? Between 1925 and 1945 much of the palace complex was demolished, as Reza Shah held that old royal buildings should not block a modern Tehran.

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26. 26 Belvedere, Vienna

    Schloss Belvedere

    Austria · 1.5 km from Vienna48.193° N 16.381° E

    

    The Belvedere is Vienna's great Baroque ensemble: two palaces facing each other across a garden that climbs a gentle slope, built as a summer residence for Prince Eugene of Savoy. His architect was Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt. The Lower Belvedere, the actual living quarters, was under way by 1712; the Upper Belvedere, intended for display and festivities, was completed in 1723.

    Did you know? Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt first met Prince Eugene during a military campaign in Piedmont, and had already built him a palace on a Danube island near Budapest.

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27. 27 Peterhof Grand Palace

    Russia · 37.2 km from Gatchina59.885° N 29.909° E

    

    The Grand Palace at Peterhof is the long golden-and-cream façade that crowns the terrace above the Grand Cascade, looking down the Sea Channel towards the Gulf of Finland. Peter the Great founded the estate as his own answer to Versailles, and the first palace here, designed with the French architect Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, was known simply as the Upper Palace and was not much larger than the other buildings in the park. Its present scale is the work of Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who between 1745 and 1755, for Empress Elizabeth, raised and extended it with wings and gilded domed pavilions until the façade stretched for some 268 metres.

    Did you know? In the Dance Hall, the blind west and north walls are lined with false mirrored windows that reflect the real two-tier windows opposite them.

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28. 28 Hampton Court Palace

    United Kingdom · 18.8 km from London51.403° N 0.337° W

    

    Hampton Court is two palaces in one: a red-brick Tudor palace of turreted gatehouses, twisted chimneys and a great hall, and, grafted onto it, a Baroque palace by Sir Christopher Wren built to answer Versailles. Set beside the Thames about 19 km south-west of central London, it was begun in 1514 by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII's chief minister, who meant it to be the finest house in England. In 1529, with his fall from favour approaching, Wolsey handed it to the king; he died the following year.

    Did you know? Henry VIII was so impatient for his Great Hall that the masons were made to work through the night by candlelight.

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29. 29 Villa Farnese

    Palazzo Farnese

    Italy42.329° N 12.237° E

    

    Villa Farnese towers over the small town of Caprarola like a fortress, and that is exactly how it began. Its plan is a regular pentagon with corner bastions, set on a platform cut from the volcanic tuff of the Cimini hills, and the town's main street runs straight up the slope to its front terraces. Inside, the severe outer shell gives way to a circular arcaded courtyard and some of the richest Mannerist interiors in Italy.

    Did you know? Peruzzi's original fortress plan angled each face of the pentagon inward so defenders could rake attackers with fire from the centre and the corner bastions.

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30. 30 Bahia Palace

    Morocco · 2.2 km from Marrakesh31.622° N 7.982° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Bahia Palace is not one building but a sequence of them, grown over four decades the way a Marrakesh house grows: a garden here, a courtyard there, corridors bending to join them. That lack of a master plan is exactly what makes walking through it so rewarding. Each doorway opens onto a different light — a shaded orchard, a blinding marble court, a small room whose ceiling seems to have been embroidered rather than built. Spread over roughly two hectares and holding around 150 rooms, it is one of the fullest expressions of late nineteenth-century Moroccan domestic architecture anywhere.

    Did you know? The whole palace was built on a single level, possibly because Ba Ahmed was so stout that climbing stairs was difficult for him.

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