Versailles

Places researched in this city

A selection of the 34 places we've researched in this city. The full set is in the Parroo app.

• Royal palace
• Baroque gardens
• Revolutionary sites
• Neoclassical chapels
• Fountains and basins

• Palace of Versailles

  What started as Louis XIII's modest hunting lodge was transformed between 1661 and 1715 into a seat of government housing over 2,300 rooms across 63,000 square meters. The palace became the template for royal architecture across Europe and, in 1919, the very Hall of Mirrors where Louis XIV had celebrated French power hosted the signing of the treaty that ended World War One.

• Hall of Mirrors

  The 357 mirrors lining this 73-meter gallery were not merely decorative: at the time of its construction between 1678 and 1684, Venetian glassmakers held a monopoly on mirror production, and France deliberately poached their craftsmen to make the point that it no longer needed to import luxury. The Hall has witnessed royal receptions, the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871, and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

• Gardens of the Palace of Versailles

  André Le Nôtre spent nearly four decades, from 1661 to 1700, converting marshland into 800 hectares of formal geometry, fountains, and woodland groves. The Grand Canal alone stretches 1.8 kilometers and once hosted a fleet of vessels including two gondolas and four gondoliers gifted by the Republic of Venice in 1674, giving one corner the nickname Little Venice.

• Royal Opera

  Inaugurated on 16 May 1770 for the wedding of the future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, this was the largest concert hall in Europe at its opening. Its entire interior is built from wood painted to imitate marble, a choice that gives the room its celebrated acoustics and also means the floors could be raised to stage level to turn the auditorium into a ballroom.

• Tennis Court Room

  Built in 1686 as a court for jeu de paume, a precursor to tennis, this plain rectangular hall became one of the most consequential rooms of the French Revolution: on 20 June 1789, the deputies of the Third Estate gathered here and swore not to disperse until France had a constitution, a moment that directly accelerated the collapse of royal authority.

• Hamlet of the Queen

  Marie Antoinette commissioned this cluster of twelve thatched buildings around an artificial lake in 1783 not as a theatrical folly but as a functioning farm: it kept cows, sheep, and chickens, and the queen genuinely used it as a retreat from court ceremony. Designed by Richard Mique in a blend of Norman, Flemish, and French rural styles, it drew on Enlightenment ideas about the virtues of simple country life.

• King's Kitchen Garden

  Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie drained a site the locals called the stinking pond between 1678 and 1683 to create a nine-hectare walled garden that supplied Louis XIV's table with fresh produce year-round. The garden survives as a working horticultural school and still produces around 60 tonnes of fruit and vegetables annually.