Versailles Palace Skip-the-Line Guided Tour with Gardens Access

The Palace of Versailles: seat of the French court

Versailles started as a hunting lodge outside Paris and became the official seat of the French monarchy in 1682, when the court and the government moved here from the capital. For more than a century the palace was the political centre of France and the model that every European court tried to copy, until the royal family was taken back to Paris in October 1789 during the Revolution. The main building has about 2,300 rooms, and the parts open to visitors, the State Apartments, the Royal Chapel, the Hall of Mirrors and the royal bedrooms, are the most richly decorated.

This Versailles guided tour covers the heart of the palace in ninety minutes, which is the ideal length: long enough for the stories behind each room, short enough to keep energy for the gardens. The palace is closed on Mondays and opens from 09:00; a morning slot is best if you also want time in the gardens, while the 13:25 departure is usually the least crowded.

The Hall of Mirrors

The Hall of Mirrors is the room everyone comes to Versailles to see. It runs 73 metres along the garden front of the palace, with seventeen tall windows on one side and seventeen matching arches filled with 357 mirrors on the other, so that the light of the gardens is reflected back into the room. The painted ceiling tells the story of the king's reign, the chandeliers and gilded statues were designed to impress foreign ambassadors, and the hall was the stage of court ceremonies, royal weddings and, in 1919, the signing of the treaty that ended the First World War.

Your guide explains how the mirrors were made in France to break the Venetian monopoly, where the throne stood on reception days and why the room links the King's Apartments to the Queen's. Groups spend about fifteen minutes here, with time for photos at the window side where the view runs down the garden axis to the Grand Canal.

The State Apartments and the King's Bedroom

The guided route begins in the King's State Apartments, a suite of seven salons named after planets and gods, each with a painted ceiling, marble walls and the furniture of court life. The Hercules Salon with its enormous ceiling painting, the Venus and Diana salons where the court played games in the evening, and the Mars, Mercury and Apollo salons, used for music, gambling and the throne, show how the palace was designed to display power through decoration. These rooms were open to the court every evening, which is why Versailles feels more like a stage than a private house.

At the centre of the palace, facing the rising sun, is the King's Bedroom, where the ceremonies of waking and going to bed were performed in front of courtiers every day. Your guide uses this room to explain the strict etiquette that governed life here. The Queen's Apartments and the Royal Chapel complete the visit when they are open.

The gardens of Versailles

The gardens of Versailles stretch across 800 hectares and took forty years to lay out, with terraces, parterres, fountains and geometric groves descending to the Grand Canal, which is 1.5 kilometres long. From the terrace behind the Hall of Mirrors you look down over the Water Parterre to the Latona Fountain, the Royal Avenue and the Apollo Fountain, where the sun god rises from the water in a chariot. Fifty fountains and more than two hundred statues decorate the walks, and the Orangery below the south terrace shelters citrus and palm trees in winter.

Your ticket includes access to the gardens after the guided tour, at your own pace, and you can stay until closing. On Musical Fountains days, usually weekends and some Tuesdays from April to October, the fountains play to music and the gardens are at their best; from November to March they are quieter and free of charge. Allow at least an hour, and more if you walk to the Grand Canal.

The Trianon estate and the Queen's Hamlet

At the far end of the park, about twenty-five minutes on foot from the palace, lie the two Trianon palaces and the Queen's Hamlet, which together form the Trianon estate. The Grand Trianon, built in pink marble in 1687, was the king's retreat from the ceremony of the main palace; the smaller Petit Trianon, completed in 1768, later became the private domain of the last queen of the old regime, who had an English-style garden and a rustic farming village, the Hamlet, built beside it in 1783, complete with a dairy, a mill and a lake.

The Trianon estate is not part of the default option, but the full-access option adds an entrance ticket for it so that you can explore it on your own after the guided tour, turning the visit into a full day of about three and a half hours or more. If you have only a morning, the palace and gardens option is the right choice.

Getting to Versailles from Paris

Versailles is about twenty kilometres south-west of Paris, and a Versailles day trip from Paris by train is straightforward. The RER C line runs from stations along the Seine, such as Saint-Michel Notre-Dame, Musée d'Orsay and Champ de Mars Tour Eiffel, to Versailles Château Rive Gauche in about forty minutes, and the palace is a ten-minute walk from that station. Trains from Montparnasse to Versailles Chantiers and from Saint-Lazare to Versailles Rive Droite are alternatives, each followed by a walk of fifteen to twenty minutes through the town.

Because the time on your voucher is the check-in time at the office, not the entry time at the palace, leave Paris at least an hour and a quarter before your slot. Late arrivals cannot be accommodated, as the group entrance only admits the group together. The town of Versailles has cafés and bakeries near the palace for a quick breakfast or lunch.