The Most Beautiful Palaces Seen on Screen in the World
15 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful palaces seen on screen in the world are Schönbrunn Palace (Austria), Palace of Versailles (France) and Sanssouci Palace (Germany). The list covers 15 palaces seen on screen in 9 countries. Germany has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Palaces are made for film: long enfilades for a camera to travel down, staircases for entrances, gardens laid out to be seen from above. Productions about kings, empresses and spies need rooms that no studio can afford to build at full scale, and the great residences supply them complete with painted ceilings and real gilding. The palaces that keep returning to the screen are the ones whose interiors and settings carry a period without any explanation.
The Forbidden City in Beijing opened its courts to Bernardo Bertolucci for The Last Emperor, the story of Puyi, who grew up inside its walls. Sofia Coppola filmed Marie Antoinette at Versailles itself, in the rooms its queen had lived in. Topkapı Palace in Istanbul gave its name to Jules Dassin's heist film Topkapi, built around a jewelled dagger in the palace treasury. Schönbrunn, the Habsburg summer residence, is bound to the screen story of Empress Elisabeth.
Other palaces have played roles far from home. Vaux-le-Vicomte, the château that provoked Louis XIV into building Versailles, appeared as Hugo Drax's residence in the Bond film Moonraker. The Royal Palace of Caserta near Naples became the Naboo palace in the Star Wars prequels. Hampton Court, Fontainebleau and Herrenchiemsee complete the range, from Tudor brick to Ludwig II's Bavarian Versailles.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Schönbrunn Palace | Palace | Austria | ✓ |
| 2 | Palace of Versailles | Palace | France | ✓ |
| 3 | Sanssouci Palace | Palace | Germany | ✓ |
| 4 | Forbidden City | Palace | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 5 | Neuschwanstein Castle | Palace | Germany | ✓ |
| 6 | Topkapı Palace | Palace | Turkey | ✓ |
| 7 | Hampton Court Palace | Palace | United Kingdom | |
| 8 | Kroměříž Castle | Palace | Czech Republic | ✓ |
| 9 | Palace of Fontainebleau | Palace | France | ✓ |
| 10 | Windsor Castle | Palace | United Kingdom | |
| 11 | Herrenchiemsee Palace | Palace | Germany | ✓ |
| 12 | Vaux-le-Vicomte | Palace | France | |
| 13 | Royal Palace of Caserta | Palace | Italy | ✓ |
| 14 | Würzburg Residence | Palace | Germany | ✓ |
| 15 | Royal Alcázar of Seville | Palace | Spain | ✓ |
01 Schönbrunn Palace
Schloss Schönbrunn
Austria · 4.3 km from Vienna48.185° N 16.312° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Sekau67 from Pixabay 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.
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.
02 Palace of Versailles
Château de Versailles
France · 1.1 km from Versailles48.805° N 2.120° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SLPix from Pixabay 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.
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.
03 Sanssouci Palace
Schloss Sanssouci
Germany · 2.2 km from Potsdam52.403° N 13.039° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JWehrstein from Pixabay 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.
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.
04 Forbidden City
People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
Did you know? The Last Emperor of 1987 was the first feature film the People's Republic of China ever allowed to be shot inside the palace.
05 Neuschwanstein Castle
Schloss Neuschwanstein
Germany47.557° N 10.749° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by derwiki from Pixabay 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.
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.
06 Topkapı Palace
Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.013° N 28.984° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by falco from Pixabay 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.
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.
07 Hampton Court Palace
United Kingdom · 18.8 km from London51.403° N 0.337° W
Image by LaraHughes from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? Henry VIII was so impatient for his Great Hall that the masons were made to work through the night by candlelight.
08 Kroměříž Castle
Czech Republic · 20.3 km from Zlín49.300° N 17.393° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 4.0 For centuries the small Moravian town of Kroměříž was the summer seat of the bishops — from 1777 archbishops — of Olomouc, and their residence here, together with two very different gardens, was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1998. UNESCO's reasoning is candid: the palace is a fine but typical princely residence; what is rare is the Baroque garden layout that survives around it almost intact.
09 Palace of Fontainebleau
Château de Fontainebleau
France · 14.8 km from Melun48.402° N 2.701° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by MustangJoe from Pixabay Fontainebleau is the palace where French kings lived for eight centuries, and it shows every one of them. It began as a hunting lodge in the forest, recorded under Louis VII in 1137, and nearly every ruler afterwards added a wing, a courtyard or a staircase, so that the buildings sprawl across several courts in a mix of styles that no single plan ever tidied up.
Did you know? Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, consecrated the chapel of the royal castle here in 1169.
10 Windsor Castle
United Kingdom · 26.1 km from Reading51.484° N 0.604° W
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Windsor Castle has been a royal residence for more than nine centuries, which makes it the longest-occupied palace in Europe and the largest castle in the world that is still lived in. Its plan is the one William the Conqueror laid down in the decade after 1066: a motte-and-bailey castle with its wards gathered around a central mound, on a ridge above the Thames.
Did you know? Edward III spent £51,000 rebuilding Windsor between 1350 and 1377, the largest sum any medieval English king spent on a single building project.
11 Herrenchiemsee Palace
Neues Schloss Herrenchiemsee
Germany · 20.2 km from Rosenheim47.860° N 12.402° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by holzijue from Pixabay On an island in the Chiemsee in southern Bavaria, King Ludwig II of Bavaria tried to build his own Versailles.
Did you know? About 16.6 million marks were spent on Herrenchiemsee, more than Linderhof and Neuschwanstein together, pushing the royal finances close to bankruptcy.
12 Vaux-le-Vicomte
Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte
France · 5 km from Melun48.566° N 2.714° E
Jean-Pol GRANDMONT · CC BY-SA 3.0 Vaux-le-Vicomte is the house that taught Louis XIV how to build Versailles, and the house that ruined the man who built it.
Did you know? The château played the California home of the villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker (1979) and stood in for Versailles in the television series Versailles.
13 Royal Palace of Caserta
Reggia di Caserta
Italy · 1.7 km from Caserta41.073° N 14.327° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by libellule789 from Pixabay The Royal Palace of Caserta was built to rival Versailles, and in sheer size it outdoes almost every royal house of the eighteenth century. Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples and later Charles III of Spain, wanted a new court and seat of government protected from attack by sea and away from crowded, restless Naples, and in 1752 work began to designs by Luigi Vanvitelli.
Did you know? King Charles laid the first stone himself on 20 January 1752, the day of his 36th birthday, yet he abdicated in 1759 and never spent a night there.
14 Würzburg Residence
Würzburger Residenz
Germany · 1.2 km from Würzburg49.793° N 9.939° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Katerwursty from Pixabay The Würzburg Residence was built for the prince-bishops of Würzburg, rulers of a small ecclesiastical state on the Main who wanted a palace to stand beside those of kings. Prince-Bishop Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn commissioned it in 1720; the shell was finished by 1744 and the interiors by 1780.
Did you know? The final series of the 50 Deutsche Mark banknote showed Balthasar Neumann on the front and the Würzburg Residence on the back.
15 Royal Alcázar of Seville
Spain · 2.5 km from Seville37.384° N 5.991° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Danor from Pixabay The Royal Alcázar of Seville is a palace built as a sequence of courtyards, each opening into the next: arcades carved with lace-like plaster, tiled walls, pools and channels of water, and beyond them a maze of gardens full of orange trees and palms.
Did you know? Arabic inscriptions in Pedro I's palace refer to the Christian king as 'Sultan Don Bidru'.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful palaces seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Schönbrunn Palace (Austria) ranks first, followed by Palace of Versailles (France) and Sanssouci Palace (Germany).
- Which country has the most palaces seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Germany (4), France (3) and the United Kingdom (2).
- Was The Last Emperor filmed in the Forbidden City?
- Yes. Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) was the first Western feature film allowed to shoot inside the Forbidden City in Beijing.
- Which palace was used as Naboo in Star Wars?
- The Royal Palace of Caserta in southern Italy was used for the interiors of the Naboo royal palace in Star Wars: Episode I and Episode II.
- Which James Bond film was shot at Vaux-le-Vicomte?
- Vaux-le-Vicomte appeared in Moonraker (1979) as part of the residence of the villain Hugo Drax.
- How many palaces seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 15 palaces seen on screen in 9 countries. Germany has the most, with 4.