Gardens of Versailles

The gardens of Versailles are less a garden than an argument about power, written in water, gravel and clipped green. They cover some 800 hectares west of the palace, and the core of them was shaped from the 1660s by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV, working alongside the architect Louis Le Vau and the painter Charles Le Brun, the same team that had just built Vaux-le-Vicomte for the disgraced finance minister Nicolas Fouquet. The king opened his new gardens in 1664 with a week-long festival, and kept enlarging them for the rest of his reign, even writing a short guide to the prescribed route through them.

The central axis tells the Sun King's story in mythological code. Below the palace terrace, the Latona Fountain shows the mother of Apollo and Diana turning the Lycian peasants who insulted her into frogs, often read as a warning to the nobles of the Fronde. Further west, Apollo himself bursts from the water in his chariot, and beyond him the Grand Canal runs on for 1.5 km, 62 metres wide, where the court once went boating in gondolas sent by the Doge of Venice. Between the main alleys hide the bosquets, enclosed garden rooms that were each a surprise: the ring of marble arches of Jules Hardouin-Mansart's Colonnade, the rockwork grotto of the Baths of Apollo, sheltering marble groups that once stood in the lost Grotto of Thetis.

The most astonishing thing about Versailles is invisible. The site had almost no water, and the fountains consumed so much that for most of Louis XIV's reign they could only run at half pressure; turning them all on at once for an afternoon took more than 10,000 cubic metres of water and was reserved for occasions such as the Siamese embassy of 1685–86. Engineers dammed the Bièvre, built the huge Machine de Marly to lift water out of the Seine, and began a canal and aqueduct to bring the river Eure from 160 km away, a project that at its peak employed tens of thousands of soldiers before war stopped it. Much of the seventeenth-century hydraulic network is still in use, and on the Grandes Eaux days, at weekends from late spring to early autumn, every fountain in the garden runs at full play.

Nothing living here is original. The gardens were entirely replanted under Louis XVI in 1774–75 and several times since; the storms of 1990 and 1999 felled thousands of trees and prompted a restoration aiming to return the layout to what Louis XIV described. What survives is the geometry, the statuary and the sense of scale. Walk out to the far end of the canal and look back: the palace sits small on its ridge, and the whole landscape runs downhill towards you as if drawn with a ruler.

Getting there

The gardens lie on the western edge of Versailles, about 2 km from the centre of Le Chesnay and some 20 km from Paris-Orly Airport (ORY). The closest railway station is Versailles Château Rive Gauche, terminus of RER line C from Paris; Versailles Rive Droite and Versailles Chantiers are also within walking distance.