Photo : Wikimedia Commons
Palais et parc de Versailles
The Château de Versailles, in the Yvelines, was born from a modest hunting lodge built by Louis XIII in 1623. Louis XIV transformed it into a palace in four major building campaigns, between 1664 and 1710. In the third, from 1678 to 1684, Jules Hardouin-Mansart created the Hall of Mirrors in place of a terrace.
The palace covers 63,154 m² and has about 2,300 rooms, of which a thousand are devoted to the national museum. The park covers 815 hectares, compared with more than 8,000 before the Revolution. It includes 93 hectares of French-style gardens, the Grand Canal, the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon.
Versailles was inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 1979. The castle is now both a museum and a meeting place of the Parliament, and is among the most visited sites in Europe. This high visitor numbers raises questions of overcrowding.
