Palace of Versailles

How to visit without losing the day to queues

Versailles is a half- to full-day trip from Paris, not a tick-box stop you squeeze between the Louvre and dinner. The mistake people make is arriving mid-morning with no ticket and joining two queues — security, then the State Apartments — when the rooms are already shoulder-to-shoulder.

Book a timed Palace entry slot online before you go. Everyone needs one, including the under-18s and under-26 EU residents who get in free. The plain Palace ticket (from about €21) covers the State Apartments and the Hall of Mirrors; the Passport (around €25 in low season, €35 in high season) adds the Trianon palaces, Marie Antoinette’s hamlet and, on fountain-show days, the gardens. Buy the Passport only if you genuinely intend to walk out to the Trianon — it is a 20-minute hike across the estate, and plenty of people never get that far.

Getting there is simple: take the RER C towards Versailles Chateau Rive Gauche (train code VICK) from a Left Bank station like Musee d’Orsay, Invalides or Champ de Mars. It is roughly 35–40 minutes, the chateau is a 10-minute walk from the terminus, and the 2026 fare to the Versailles zone is only a few euros each way. The palace is closed every Monday, plus 1 January, 1 May and 25 December — the single most common wasted trip.

The gardens are the part people underrate

Aim for the 9:00 opening or a slot after 16:00, when the coach tours head back to Paris and the Hall of Mirrors calms down. Go on a Wednesday or Thursday if you can; Tuesdays are the heaviest day (the backlog after the Monday closure) and weekends are worse. Spring and autumn are far kinder than high summer, when the apartments get hot and slow.

Versailles is worth it, but the gardens are the part people underrate. The State Apartments are genuinely staggering, yet by late morning you are inching through them in a crowd, looking at ceilings over other people’s heads. Step out into the gardens — free to enter outside fountain-show days — and the scale finally makes sense: the Grand Canal, the parterres, the long axis the whole place was built around. Allow half a day for the palace and main gardens, a full day if you want the Trianon too, and resist stacking it onto an already-full Paris day. It rewards the trip out far more than it rewards a rushed hour.