Versailles Palace Guided Tour by Deluxe Minibus from Paris

The Palace of Versailles: from hunting lodge to seat of the kingdom

The Palace of Versailles began in 1623 as a small brick hunting lodge in marshland twenty kilometres south-west of Paris. From 1661 the king who would reign for seventy-two years turned it into the largest palace in Europe, and in 1682 he moved the court and the government here, where they stayed until the Revolution of 1789. The result is a building of about 2,300 rooms set in an estate of 800 hectares, listed by UNESCO since 1979 and visited by millions every year. The gilded gates, the Marble Courtyard and the long stone facade on the garden side are the first things you see when the minibus drops you at the entrance.

A Versailles guided tour with transport removes the two problems independent visitors face: the ticket queue, which can take well over an hour in summer, and the train connection from Paris. The group enters through a separate entrance and the guide leads the way through the palace in a little under two hours.

The State Apartments and the Royal Chapel

The visit starts in the Royal Chapel, completed in 1710, two storeys high with white marble columns, a painted ceiling and a gilded organ; the king attended mass here every morning from the upper gallery. From there the guide takes you through the King's State Apartments, a suite of seven salons each dedicated to a planet and decorated with marble, bronze and ceilings painted by the court painter: the Hercules Salon with its enormous canvas, the Venus, Diana, Mars, Mercury and Apollo salons, and the War Salon with its stucco relief of the king on horseback.

These rooms were the public face of the monarchy, where ambassadors were received and the court gathered three evenings a week. The guide explains the etiquette that ruled every gesture here, how the rooms were heated and lit, and why the furniture is mostly gone, sold at auction after the Revolution. Allow about half an hour for this part of the Versailles palace tour.

The Hall of Mirrors

The Hall of Mirrors is the room everyone comes to Versailles to see: a gallery 73 metres long and 10.5 metres wide, lit by 17 arched windows facing the gardens and reflected in 17 matching arches holding 357 mirrors, a display of luxury at a time when mirrors were made only in Venice. The vaulted ceiling tells the king's military and political story in thirty painted scenes, and the gilded statues, crystal chandeliers and marble pilasters were restored to their full brilliance in the 2000s. In 1919 the treaty ending the First World War was signed at a table in the centre of this gallery.

The guide times the visit so the group gets the best light and explains the mirrors, the ceiling and the daily life of the court here, where courtiers waited for hours to see the king pass. The Hall of Mirrors guided tour lasts about fifteen minutes, with time for photographs at the garden windows.

The Queen's Bedroom and the Gallery of Battles

The Queen's Apartments mirror the king's on the south side of the palace. The Queen's Bedroom, where nineteen royal children were born in public view according to court custom, is hung with the summer silk of 1786 in flowers and ribbons, with the gilded bed, the jewel cabinet and the hidden door through which the last queen of the old regime fled the crowd in October 1789. The guide explains the strange ceremony of the queen's day, from the public waking to the public dressing.

Downstairs, the Gallery of Battles was created in 1837 when the palace became a museum of French history: 120 metres long and lined with 33 monumental paintings of the battles that shaped France from the fifth century to 1809, with busts of the commanders who died in them. It is the longest room in the palace and a quiet contrast to the crowded apartments upstairs, and the guided visit ends here before the gardens.

The gardens of Versailles: parterres, groves and the Grand Canal

After the guided visit you have free time in the gardens, laid out in the formal French style with geometric parterres, clipped hedges and avenues that lead the eye to the Grand Canal, a cross-shaped stretch of water 1.6 kilometres long where the court once staged boat parties. The Latona Fountain and the Apollo Fountain sit on the main axis below the palace terrace, and hidden between the hedges are the groves, outdoor rooms with fountains, statues and colonnades. On weekends and some weekdays in season the fountains play to music, when the gardens require a separate ticket not included in this tour.

Is the garden worth the time? Yes: the terrace view down to the canal is the single best photograph at Versailles, and half an hour is enough for the parterres and a couple of groves. The Trianon palaces and the Queen's hamlet are too far for the time available and are not part of this tour.

The road from Paris and the town of Versailles

The minibus leaves from the tour office at 41 Avenue de la Bourdonnais, a short walk from the Eiffel Tower, and takes the A13 motorway west out of Paris through the Saint-Cloud tunnel, a drive of about forty-five minutes depending on traffic. The town of Versailles grew up around the palace as the town of courtiers, servants and tradesmen, and the approach along the Avenue de Paris, with the royal stables on either side of the Place d'Armes, shows the scale the planners intended.

How to get to Versailles from Paris independently involves the RER C or a suburban train and a fifteen-minute walk; the minibus removes that and brings you back to the same office in the 7th arrondissement about four hours after departure. The palace is closed on Mondays, so the booking calendar on this page shows the days available. Best time to visit Versailles: the 08:15 departure in spring and autumn, when the rooms are quietest.