Versailles
What stops you first at Versailles isn't the scale — it's the specificity. The Hall of Mirrors, built between 1678 and 1689, lines 357 mirrors against 357 windows, so that on a clear afternoon the garden light bounces back at itself endlessly. The palace covers roughly 63,000 square metres and holds around 2,300 rooms, and yet the detail in each one insists on your attention.
The estate beyond the building is its own argument. André Le Nôtre's gardens stretch across more than 800 hectares, threaded by 50 fountains and a Grand Canal nearly 1.6 kilometres long. The Trianon palaces sit at the far end of that geometry, quieter and easier to linger in than the main château.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to agree on one thing: skip the main palace on a Tuesday or weekend and go straight to the Trianon Estate, which opens at noon. The Petit Trianon especially rewards a slower pace. Wednesday or Thursday mornings in October, when the passport ticket runs €25, are the sweet spot most regulars quietly keep to themselves.
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How Versailles came to be
Louis XIII put up a hunting lodge here in 1623–24, rebuilt it in stone by 1634. His son Louis XIV saw something larger in the site: major construction campaigns began in 1664, with Louis Le Vau raising the King's and Queen's State Apartments and wrapping the original brick structure in a white stone garden façade. After Le Vau died in 1670, Jules Hardouin-Mansart took over as first architect in 1681, completing the Hall of Mirrors and the Royal Chapel — the latter finished in 1710. From 6 May 1682 until 6 October 1789, this was the permanent seat of the French court and government.
The Revolution ended that. In 1792 the National Convention stripped the palace of its paintings for the Louvre; in 1793 royal property went to auction. The building found a new identity in 1830 when Louis-Philippe I converted it into a museum dedicated to 'All the Glories of France', which is, in essence, what it remains.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring (April to June) and autumn (September to November) bring mild temperatures and more manageable crowds than the summer peak. Winter visits from November to March mean shorter queues and a different quality of light in the gardens, though the fountains run only on select days.
Right now
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.