The Most Beautiful Palaces in Europe
56 places in 16 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful palaces in Europe are Schönbrunn Palace (Austria), Diocletian's Palace (Croatia) and Palace of Versailles (France). The list covers 56 palaces in 16 countries. Germany has the most, with 10. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe's palaces trace the shift from defence to display. Once rulers no longer needed walls, they poured their wealth into staircases, gardens, mirrored halls and painted ceilings, and every court tried to outdo the next. Roman emperors, Moorish sultans, Venetian doges, Habsburg emperors and wealthy merchant cities all left their versions, so the word palace covers everything from a fortified retirement home to a Gothic town hall.
Diocletian's Palace in Split is the oldest of them: built for a Roman emperor around AD 300, it later filled with houses and streets until it became the old town itself. The Alhambra in Granada shows the Nasrid sultans' art of carved stucco, tiled walls and courtyards built around water. The Doge's Palace in Venice, with its pink-and-white Gothic arcades, was the seat of the Republic's government for centuries.
The great royal residences come later. Versailles turned a hunting lodge into the model for courts across Europe, with its Hall of Mirrors and vast formal gardens; Schönbrunn in Vienna was the Habsburgs' summer residence; Sanssouci in Potsdam, Frederick the Great's retreat, sits atop a terraced vineyard. Civic pride produced its own palaces too: the town halls of Bremen and Leuven are richly carved showpieces of merchant wealth. Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra and the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona bring the story into the 20th century with symbolism, mosaics and Catalan Modernisme.
In this list
01 Schönbrunn Palace
Schloss Schönbrunn
Austria · 4.3 km from Vienna48.185° N 16.312° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Sekau67 from Pixabay History settled deep into these rooms. Franz Joseph, who reigned for 68 years, was born here and died here in November 1916, two years before the monarchy fell. The palace then passed to the Austrian Republic and became a museum; after the Second World War it housed the British element of the Allied administration, and in 1961 it hosted the summit between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Since 1996 the palace and its gardens have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, valued as a complete Baroque ensemble of building, garden and decoration.
Did you know? The Palm House of 1882 used some 600 tonnes of wrought iron and 120 tonnes of cast iron; it is 111 metres long and glazed with about 45,000 panes.
02 Diocletian's Palace
Dioklecijanova palača
Croatia · 2.9 km from Split43.508° N 16.438° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay What makes the palace unique is what happened next. When Salona was sacked in the 7th century, its refugees moved inside the walls, and they never left. Houses, churches and shops filled the courtyards and streets, and the palace became the core of Split. Today it still forms about half of the old town, with some 3,000 residents living inside it, and the medieval city is built into the Roman walls rather than beside them.
Did you know? Some of the granite sphinxes shipped from Egypt were already ancient on arrival, dating back about 3,500 years to the reign of Thutmose III.
03 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 The centre of it all is the Hall of Mirrors, begun in 1678 on the site of a terrace facing the gardens. Its 578 mirrors face 17 tall windows, doubling the daylight, and Le Brun's ceiling tells the first 18 years of Louis XIV's personal rule in 30 painted scenes, most of them victories over the Dutch. The room has a second life as a stage of European history: the German Empire was proclaimed here on 18 January 1871, and the Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War was signed here in June 1919. Nearby are the king's bedchamber, where Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715, the Royal Chapel completed in 1710, and the Royal Opera, where Napoleon III gave a banquet for Queen Victoria in 1855.
Did you know? To feed the gardens, the Machine de Marly, built in 1681, used fourteen giant water wheels driving 253 pumps to lift water from the Seine.
04 Sanssouci Palace
Schloss Sanssouci
Germany · 2.2 km from Potsdam52.403° N 13.039° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JWehrstein from Pixabay Between 1750 and 1753, Voltaire lived here at Frederick's invitation, drawn into the king's habit of hosting philosophical "table talk" dinners that ran more like salons than state functions. It's one of the more famous literary friendships of the Enlightenment, and one of the more famous fallings-out: the relationship curdled over disputes involving other court intellectuals and Voltaire's own sharp tongue, and he left Potsdam in 1753 having produced, among other things, some scathing private commentary on his royal host that eventually leaked.
Did you know? The ruins on the Ruinenberg hill above the palace are fake: built in 1748, they disguise a reservoir of about 7,600 cubic metres meant to feed the fountains.
05 Quinta da Regaleira
Portugal · 23.1 km from Lisbon38.796° N 9.396° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The palace itself is a vertical fantasy of pinnacles, gargoyles, carved capitals and a slim octagonal tower, fronted by a loggia whose stone columns shelter tiled scenes of a royal hunt. Inside, five floors run from the servants' quarters and kitchen, with its food lift, to Monteiro's study; one room is lined with portraits of the kings of Portugal. Opposite stands the small Chapel of the Holy Trinity, built in the same idiom and rising through several levels.
Did you know? The well's 23 niches are grouped 17, 1 and 5, which a Spanish engineering team in 2010 read as a code for 1715, when the estate was sold at auction.
06 Alhambra
Spain · 1.3 km from Granada37.176° N 3.588° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by janmichael from Pixabay Almost nothing in the palace decoration is there by accident. The Court of the Lions, its twelve stone lions supporting a fountain at the intersection of four channels, is a literal architectural translation of the Quranic description of paradise as a garden fed by four rivers — the geometry is theology, not just design.
Did you know? In the Hall of Ambassadors, Christopher Columbus put his plan for an Atlantic voyage to Ferdinand and Isabella, who signed his contract in April 1492 during their stay here.
07 Nesvizh Castle
Нясвіжскі палацава-паркавы комплекс
Belarus53.223° N 26.692° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by arkadiy69 from Pixabay The Radziwiłłs held Nesvizh from 1533. In 1582 Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł, nicknamed "the Orphan", began replacing the old fortress with a square three-storey palace, finished by 1604, whose corners were defended by octagonal towers; for a time the state archive of the Grand Duchy, the Lithuanian Metrica, was kept here. Swedish troops of Charles XII sacked the castle in 1706 during the Great Northern War, and in the rebuilding that followed the separate wings were joined into one building and the façades received their Baroque stucco.
Did you know? Its late-16th-century guns were cast with names such as Crocodile, Salamander, Parrot, Owl and Hydra, many bearing menacing Latin mottoes on the barrel.
08 Town Hall of Bremen
Bremer Rathaus
Germany · 0.7 km from Bremen53.076° N 8.808° E
Image by SLPix from Pixabay The building was a political statement from the start. The city council placed it on the market square so that the square, until then dominated by the cathedral and the archbishop's palace, would now be dominated by the burghers; its two great halls were even made slightly longer and wider than the hall of the archbishop's palace. Sixteen large statues of emperors and prince-electors on the walls proclaimed Bremen's claim to be an imperial city. 5-metre figure of Charlemagne's paladin with drawn sword and the imperial eagle on his shield, was raised in 1404 in place of a wooden one burned by the archbishop.
Did you know? Alongside the sixteen emperors and prince-electors, the Gothic facade also carried statues of four philosophers of antiquity.
09 Hospital de Sant Pau
Hospital de la Santa Cruz y San Pablo
Spain · 3.1 km from Barcelona41.413° N 2.174° E
Matinibz · CC BY-SA 3.0 The institution itself is far older. The Hospital de la Santa Creu was founded in 1401 by merging six small medieval hospitals, and its Gothic buildings in the old city now house the National Library of Catalonia. By the late nineteenth century they were overcrowded, and the bequest of Pau Gil, a Barcelona-born banker based in Paris who left part of his fortune for a new hospital dedicated to Saint Paul, made the move possible. The first stone was laid in 1902. Domènech's plan placed the pavilions along two main axes set on the diagonals of the site, forming a cross that recalls the old hospital's emblem, with service tunnels running underground between the buildings.
Did you know? The original grounds covered about 145,000 square metres, equal to nine blocks of the Eixample, giving roughly 145 square metres per bed against a European norm of about 100.
10 Neuschwanstein Castle
Schloss Neuschwanstein
Germany47.557° N 10.749° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by derwiki from Pixabay Underneath the turrets it was surprisingly modern for its decade: running water on every floor, forced-air central heating, and telephone lines connecting rooms — comforts most contemporary castles in Europe didn't have, hidden behind walls designed to look centuries older. None of it was paid for with state money; Ludwig financed construction almost entirely through personal loans and his private fortune, which is exactly what fed the rumours of financial recklessness his ministers used to have him declared mentally unfit in 1886.
Did you know? The first design came from Christian Jank, a theatre scenery painter, rather than from an architect.
11 Doge's Palace
Palazzo Ducale
Italy · 0.7 km from Venice45.434° N 12.340° E
Image by 495756 from Pixabay A ducal palace stood here from the early 9th century, but almost nothing of the first buildings survives. The present Gothic structure was begun around 1340 on the waterfront wing, extended along the Piazzetta from 1424 under Doge Francesco Foscari, and given its ceremonial entrance, the Porta della Carta by Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon, in 1438–1442. Fires in 1483, 1574 and 1577 destroyed whole suites of rooms and paintings by Bellini, Carpaccio and Titian. After the last one Venice chose to rebuild in the original Gothic style rather than adopt a classical design submitted by Andrea Palladio. The palace became a museum in 1923.
Did you know? The stolen painting was recovered by police less than a month later, on 7 November 1991.
12 Leuven Town Hall
Stadhuis van Leuven
Belgium · 26.5 km from Brussels50.879° N 4.701° E
Image by HannekeV from Pixabay Leuven, in Flemish Brabant east of Brussels, has been a university town since 1425, when a studium generale was founded here in what was then the Duchy of Brabant. The town hall was begun on the site of an older one as part of a larger complex of municipal buildings. Its first architect, Sulpitius van Vorst, died soon after work started, and so did his successor Jan Keldermans II, in 1445. The building as it stands is the work of Matheus de Layens, who took over in 1448 and laid the first stone of the front house that March.
Did you know? Of the 236 statues, 149 stand on the facades and 87 on the turrets, all made between 1849 and 1913.
13 Peleș Castle
Romania · 32.4 km from Brașov45.360° N 25.543° E
Vislupus · CC BY-SA 4.0 The style is a romantic mix of Neo-Renaissance and Gothic Revival, with Saxon half-timbered façades and allegorical murals in the inner courtyard, and Baroque-inspired interiors of dark carved wood. More than 170 rooms are each themed — Florentine, Turkish, Moorish, French, Imperial — and filled with an astonishing collection: nearly 2,000 paintings, Sèvres and Meissen porcelain, Córdoba leather, Swiss stained glass, Oriental rugs from Bukhara to Smyrna.
Did you know? Dozens of gold 20-lei coins, the first Romanian coins bearing Carol I's portrait, were buried beneath the castle's foundation stone.
14 Belvedere, Vienna
Schloss Belvedere
Austria · 1.5 km from Vienna48.193° N 16.381° E
Image by lapping from Pixabay Between them lies a formal garden in the French manner designed by Dominique Girard, laid out in three large terraces with symmetrical parterres, basins, steps, cascades, clipped hedges and sculpture. The upper palace is best seen from the bottom of the garden, rising above its terraces, while from its own front the view runs back over the garden towards the inner city.
Did you know? In 1719, while the interiors of the Upper Belvedere were still being decorated, Eugene received the Ottoman ambassador Ibrahim Pasha there.
15 Hampton Court Palace
United Kingdom · 18.8 km from London51.403° N 0.337° W
Image by LaraHughes from Pixabay Wolsey's work survives in the Base Court and the gatehouse to the Clock Court, where relief busts of Roman emperors by the Italian sculptor Giovanni da Maiano are set into the brickwork. Henry VIII turned the house into one of his favourite residences, quadrupling the kitchens to feed a court of more than a thousand people and adding, between 1532 and 1535, the Great Hall with its carved hammerbeam roof — the last medieval great hall built for an English monarch. The gatehouse carries an astronomical clock made in 1540 that still shows the hour, the phases of the moon, the zodiac and the time of high water at London Bridge, once essential for anyone arriving by barge.
Did you know? Mary I spent more than five months here awaiting a child during a phantom pregnancy, leaving only when the crowded palace had become unlivable.
16 Villa Farnese
Palazzo Farnese
Italy42.329° N 12.237° E
Livioandronico2013 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The first owner of the estate, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese – later Pope Paul III – acquired it in 1504 and had Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Baldassare Peruzzi design a pentagonal stronghold; its foundations were laid probably between 1515 and 1530. His grandson, also Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, decided to turn the half-built fortress into a country residence and in 1556 engaged Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, fresh from building Villa Giulia for Pope Julius III. Work began in 1559 and Vignola directed it until his death in 1573.
Did you know? Beneath the front terraces, a basement hollowed out of the tuff served as a covered carriage entrance in bad weather, held up by one massive central column.
17 Palau Güell
Spain · 0.9 km from Barcelona41.379° N 2.174° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Piggyofdoom · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building's centre is a full-height hall that rises through the house and opens to a conical dome pierced with small holes that scatter daylight down through the room like scattered stars — a space that served simultaneously as a reception hall for entertaining Barcelona's elite and, on the floor below, as a private chapel where Mass could be said for the household. That double use, grand and devotional in the same vertical shaft, is a fairly literal expression of how tightly religion and status were wound together for a patron like Güell.
Did you know? Between the two gates rises a column bearing the four bars of the Catalan coat of arms, crowned by a phoenix.
18 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 The palace has a long history of destruction and rebuilding. A late-Gothic residence built around 1500 was sacked by the Swedish army in 1643 during the Thirty Years' War. From 1664 Bishop Karl of Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn had it rebuilt in Baroque style by the Italian architect Filiberto Lucchese and, after his death, by Giovanni Pietro Tencalla. When fire gutted the building in 1752, Bishop Hamilton brought in two of the leading painters of the empire, Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Josef Stern, to decorate the state rooms. Their ceilings still frame the palace's great halls, and the rooms were used by Miloš Forman as a stand-in for Vienna's Hofburg in the film Amadeus.
19 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 The most important part is the work of Francis I, who from 1528 turned the old castle into a Renaissance palace, entered through the Porte Dorée. He brought Italian artists north, and in the Gallery of Francis I, decorated between 1533 and 1539, Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio combined painted panels with high stucco figures, garlands and cartouches in a way nobody had tried before. The result, the School of Fontainebleau, spread the Renaissance through France. The ballroom created under Henry II, with frescoes by Niccolò dell'Abbate, the Trinity Chapel, and the 80-metre Gallery of Diana made under Henry IV and later lined with books, carry the story on.
Did you know? Henry IV dug a 1,200-metre Grand Canal in the park about sixty years before the canal at Versailles.
20 Windsor Castle
United Kingdom · 26.1 km from Reading51.484° N 0.604° W
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay The silhouette most people know is surprisingly young. Under George IV, from 1824, the architect Jeffry Wyatville reworked the Upper Ward into a romantic Gothic fantasy and raised the Round Tower by about thirty feet so that it would dominate the skyline, at a cost that ran past a million pounds by 1840. Inside, the State Apartments combine seventeenth-century rooms by Hugh May at the western end with Wyatville's grand Georgian sequence to the east.
Did you know? England's earliest weight-driven mechanical clock was installed for Edward III in the Round Tower in 1354.
21 Frederiksborg Palace
Denmark · 1 km from Hillerød55.935° N 12.301° E
Original uploader was Kresten Hartvig Klit at da.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 2.5 The approach is part of the show. On the way in stands the Neptune Fountain, a work designed by Adriaen de Vries in 1620–1622. Swedish troops carried the original away as booty in 1659; what stands now is a copy made in 1888. The palace faces are richly carved, with sandstone figures, cartouches and window surrounds that stand out against the dark red brick, and the whole mass is doubled in the water of the Slotssø.
Did you know? Carlsberg brewer J. C. Jacobsen funded the Museum of National History in the rebuilt castle, opened in 1882, which now holds Denmark's largest portrait collection.
22 Palazzo Vecchio
Italy · 1.3 km from Florence43.769° N 11.256° E
Image by user32212 from Pixabay The commune decided to build a palace for its magistrates in 1299, and the work is attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio, the architect also associated with the cathedral and Santa Croce. He set the building on land once owned by the Ghibelline Uberti family, so that their houses could never rise there again, and incorporated an older family tower into the base of the new one, which is why the tower stands off centre. Its cells held Cosimo the Elder in 1435 and the friar Girolamo Savonarola in 1498. The rusticated walls are pierced by paired Gothic windows, and under the battlements runs a band of painted coats of arms of the republic.
Did you know? The tower's one-handed clock was first built in 1353; the present mechanism is a 1667 replacement made by the Augsburg clockmaker Georg Lederle.
23 Zwinger, Dresden
Zwinger
Germany · 1.2 km from Dresden51.053° N 13.734° E
Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay Each pavilion has its own character. The Crown Gate, raised in 1714–1718, is crowned by four Polish eagles bearing a copy of the Polish royal crown, a reminder of the elector's second throne. On the Wall Pavilion, Permoser's Hercules Saxonicus shoulders the globe above the Saxon-Polish arms. Tucked behind the galleries, the Nymphenbad is less a bath than a water theatre open to the sky, with cascades, a grotto and nymph figures. The Glockenspiel Pavilion holds a carillon of 40 Meissen porcelain bells, enlarged to that number in 1933, which plays at every quarter hour.
Did you know? Its cascades were fed from a copper tank in the tower of the Wilsdruff Gate; when the tower was pulled down, the fountain ran dry for almost a century.
24 Old Town Hall, Bamberg
Altes Rathaus
Germany49.892° N 10.887° E
Image by anaterate from Pixabay The town hall is first recorded in 1387 and took its present form in a Gothic rebuilding between 1461 and 1467. Between 1744 and 1756 the architect Johann Jakob Michael Küchel remodelled it in Baroque and Rococo style. In 1755 the painter Johann Anwander covered both long sides with illusionistic frescoes of allegorical scenes and painted architecture. After the paintings had faded almost completely, Anton Greiner repainted them between 1959 and 1962. On the eastern side the trompe-l'oeil goes a step further: a carved leg of a putto actually projects from the wall, so that a painted figure seems to step out of the plaster.
Did you know? Above the hall's entrance hangs a 15th-century wooden panel quoting the Sachsenspiegel, the most influential German law book of the Middle Ages.
25 Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans
Резиденція митрополитів Буковини і Далмації
Ukraine · 1 km from Chernivtsi48.297° N 25.925° E
Oleksandr Malyon · CC BY-SA 4.0 The background is the transfer of the Orthodox see from Rădăuți to Chernivtsi after Bukovina passed to the Habsburgs in 1782. The first residence was a hasty, damp building that partly collapsed in 1790, and for decades the bishops lived in rented rooms until a competition held in 1860 brought in Hlávka. Construction dragged on through technical problems, Hlávka's illness from 1872 and his disputes with local officials; the complex was finally consecrated in the winter of 1882–83. Three wings frame a courtyard about 100 metres deep and 70 metres wide, closed by gates in tall railings.
Did you know? Hlávka's programme went well beyond a palace, adding offices, meeting halls, a library, a choir school, a museum of church art and a chapel.
More about Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans →
26 Royal Castle in Warsaw
Poland · 2 km from Warsaw52.248° N 21.014° E
Image by 5892437 from Pixabay The castle's golden age came under Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. Domenico Merlini and Jakub Fontana remodelled the state rooms in a refined neoclassical manner, and the court painter Marcello Bacciarelli filled them with allegorical ceilings and royal portraits. One room was hung with Bernardo Bellotto's precise views of Warsaw, still called the Canaletto Room; those paintings later became an essential guide for rebuilding the city. In the Senate Chamber the Great Sejm adopted the Constitution of 3 May 1791, Europe's first modern written constitution and the second in the world after that of the United States.
27 Aljafería
Spain · 0.9 km from Zaragoza41.656° N 0.897° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Pixels4Free from Pixabay Behind a severe ring of walls and towers the palace opens onto the Patio de Santa Isabel, a courtyard with pools and porticoes where the taifa architects pushed the arch to its limits. Mixtilinear and multilobed arches cross and interlace until they read more like lace than masonry, and the plaster is carved into dense geometric and vegetal patterns. The small private mosque is the jewel: a square room with chamfered corners that give it an octagonal feel, a horseshoe-arched mihrab turned towards Mecca, and walls covered with blind interlaced arches.
Did you know? Its layout follows the eighth-century Umayyad desert castles of Syria and Jordan: a square enclosure with round towers and a central courtyard with pools.
28 Herrenchiemsee Palace
Neues Schloss Herrenchiemsee
Germany · 20.2 km from Rosenheim47.860° N 12.402° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by holzijue from Pixabay Ludwig bought the Herreninsel in 1873, and building began on 21 May 1878 to designs by Georg von Dollmann, with Christian Jank and Franz von Seitz. The state bedroom, conceived as a ceremonial room after Louis XIV's own, was finished by 1881. Money ran out, and when the king died in 1886 only the central section stood, with 50 of the planned 70 rooms unfinished. Ludwig spent just a few days here, in September 1885. The incomplete north wing was pulled down in 1907, and empty rooms in the south wing have housed a museum devoted to the king since 1987.
Did you know? The dining room has a table on a lift and what is described as the world's largest Meissen porcelain chandelier.
29 Palazzo del Te
Palazzo Te
Italy · 36.2 km from Verona45.148° N 10.787° E
Sailko · CC BY 3.0 Inside, the rooms grow ever more extravagant. In the Hall of Horses, life-size portraits of the Gonzaga's favourite horses stand before painted landscapes and false niches, under a gilded coffered ceiling. The Chamber of Cupid and Psyche, the duke's dining room, tells the love story from Apuleius in sensual frescoes, a celebration of Federico's mistress Isabella Boschetti as much as of myth. Charles V was received here in 1530, on the visit when Federico was raised from marquess to duke.
Did you know? Giulio Romano placed a real fireplace beneath the painted face of the fire-breathing giant Typhon, so the flames seemed to pour out of the fresco.
30 Rundāle Palace
Latvia · 32.9 km from Jelgava56.413° N 24.025° E
Image by lovelydress0 from Pixabay The interiors of the second campaign are the palace's glory. Between 1765 and 1768 the Berlin sculptor Johann Michael Graff filled the rooms with stucco, from flowers and fruit to birds, and the Italian painters Francesco Martini and Carlo Zucchi, called from St Petersburg, painted the ceilings. The Gold Hall, the duke's throne room, gleams with gilded stucco over two-coloured artificial marble, and its ceiling shows the apotheosis of Duke Ernst Johann. The White Hall, first planned as a chapel, was turned into a ballroom in the second building period.
Did you know? Work stopped in 1740 when Biron, briefly regent of the Russian Empire, was overthrown and exiled to Siberia; it resumed only after his return in 1762.
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 in Europe?
- On our list, Schönbrunn Palace (Austria) ranks first, followed by Diocletian's Palace (Croatia) and Palace of Versailles (France).
- Which country has the most palaces in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Germany (10), Spain (10) and Italy (9).
- Why was the Palace of Versailles built?
- Louis XIV transformed his father's hunting lodge into a vast palace and in 1682 moved the royal court and government there from Paris. Versailles became the model for royal palaces across Europe.
- Is Diocletian's Palace still lived in?
- Yes. After the Roman era, the people of Split built homes, shops and churches inside the palace walls, and today it forms the heart of the old town, where people still live and work.
- What is the Initiation Well at Quinta da Regaleira?
- It is a spiral stairwell sunk deep into the ground in the estate's gardens in Sintra, Portugal, used not for water but as a symbolic, ceremonial descent. It was created in the early 20th century along with the rest of the estate.
- How many palaces are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 56 palaces in 16 countries. Germany has the most, with 10.