Versailles Palace & Gardens Guided Tour by Train from Paris

From Pont de l'Alma to Versailles by train

The day begins beside the Pont de l'Alma, on the Right Bank a short walk from the Champs-Élysées, where your guide waits outside a café holding a sign. From the nearby RER C station the suburban train runs south-west out of Paris to Versailles Château-Rive Gauche in about forty-five minutes, and your guide travels with you, using the journey to explain how a hunting lodge in marshy countryside became the seat of the French monarchy from 1682 until the Revolution of 1789.

From the station it is a ten-minute walk through the town to the golden gates of the palace, with the guide pointing out the royal stables opposite. A Versailles day trip from Paris by train is far quicker than by road in rush hour, and the return ticket in your pocket means you can stay in the gardens as long as you like and ride back unguided whenever you choose.

The Palace of Versailles and the Royal Chapel

The Palace of Versailles grew in stages across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a building of some 2,300 rooms, housing the king, his family, the court and the government of France in one vast complex of marble, gilt and painted ceilings. With your timed-entry ticket you skip the ticket queue, pass security and enter with the guide, who turns the long corridors into a story of ceremony, politics and daily life at court.

The first great space is the Royal Chapel, completed in 1710, with its white columns rising two storeys to a painted vault and a gallery where the royal family heard mass each morning above the courtiers below. Versailles opening hours run from nine in the morning, and the palace is closed on Mondays; the tour's morning starts put you inside before the midday peak. Allow about twenty minutes here before moving to the apartments.

The State Apartments

The King's State Apartments are a sequence of seven salons, each named after a planet and painted with scenes from mythology, where the king received ambassadors and held his evening gatherings. Your guide explains the rituals of the royal rising and retiring, the games of etiquette and how the layout of the rooms controlled who could approach the monarch. Across the palace, the Queen's Apartment shows the bedchamber where nineteen royal children were born in public view.

The guided visit also passes the apartments of the princesses on the ground floor and the galleries of paintings that record the palace's history. This is the part of a Versailles tour where a guide earns their keep: every ceiling tells a political message, and the group moves through them in around forty-five minutes while most unguided visitors drift past with no idea what they are looking at.

The Hall of Mirrors

The tour builds to the Hall of Mirrors, the seventy-three-metre gallery completed in 1684 that runs along the garden front of the palace. Seventeen arched windows face seventeen arches of mirrors, 357 panes in all, so that daylight from the gardens bounces off the glass and the gilded chandeliers; in an age when mirrors were a luxury, the room was a statement of French wealth and craftsmanship. The painted ceiling celebrates the military and civil achievements of the king who built it.

Your guide explains how the gallery was used for court receptions and royal weddings, and how in 1919 the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War was signed here. Is Versailles worth visiting just for this room? Many say yes; standing at one end and looking down the length of mirrors to the gardens beyond is the moment the whole day leads to.

The Gardens of Versailles

Stepping out onto the terrace, your guide gives an introduction to the Gardens of Versailles, laid out from the 1660s as the largest formal garden in Europe: geometric parterres edged with box, the Latona fountain on its tiered basin, the long green carpet leading down to the Apollo fountain and the Grand Canal stretching beyond it for more than a kilometre and a half. Groves hidden among the hedges hold fountains and sculptures designed for the court's entertainments.

The guided part ends here, and the gardens are yours to explore freely. On musical fountain days in spring and summer the fountains play to Baroque music and garden entry is ticketed; on other days the gardens are free to enter. The best time to visit the Gardens of Versailles is a dry afternoon when the groves are open; wear comfortable shoes, as distances are long.

The Trianon Estate

A thirty-minute walk, or a ride on the little train or a rented golf buggy, takes you to the Trianon Estate at the far end of the park, where the royal family escaped the formality of the palace. The Grand Trianon is a single-storey pavilion of pink marble and open colonnades built in 1687, and the Petit Trianon a neoclassical house of the 1760s that became the private retreat of the last queen before the Revolution.

Beyond it lies the Queen's Hamlet, a make-believe village of thatched cottages, a dairy and a working farm around a lake, perhaps the most photographed corner of the whole estate. The Trianon buildings open from noon, so they fit naturally into the free time after the morning tour. When you are ready, walk or ride back to the station and use your return ticket to Paris.