Palace of Versailles

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.

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.

After the Revolution the palace lost its purpose. Louis-Philippe gave it a new purpose in the 1830s by turning much of it into a museum dedicated to all the glories of France, and the National Museum of the History of France still occupies about a thousand rooms of the palace and the Trianons. From the 1950s curators set about returning the state rooms to how they looked in 1789, a task that continues.

The estate is as much a landscape as a building. The park covers 815 hectares today, a tenth of its pre-Revolution extent, with 93 hectares of formal gardens. Beyond the parterres and the Grand Canal lie the Grand Trianon, later used by Napoleon, and the Petit Trianon and the Queen's Hamlet, as well as the Orangerie and the Pièce d'Eau des Suisses. A storm on 26 December 1999 felled more than 10,000 of the park's trees, and much of today's planting dates from the replanting that followed. As one of the most visited sites in Europe, Versailles is also at the centre of the debate about overtourism.

Getting there

The palace stands on the Place d'Armes in the town of Versailles, about 16 km southwest of central Paris. The closest railway station is Versailles Château Rive Gauche, the terminus of RER C; Versailles Chantiers, the town's main station, has more frequent trains. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 19 km away.