Every palace has a door. Some of them have a queue.
Which Alhambra ticket actually gets you into the Nasrid Palaces. What Versailles costs once the gardens are included. Whether the Grand Palace is worth a guide. Reviews of the palace visits you can book, priced and timed.
Four gates that decide the rest of the trip.
Granada, Sintra, Madrid and London. The four palace tickets people plan whole weeks around, what each one costs and what you actually get through the door.
01The timed oneAlhambra and Nasrid Palaces Entry TicketYour ticket carries a half-hour slot for the Nasrid Palaces. Miss it and the rest of the Alhambra is still open to you, but that part is not.
02The one on the hillPena Palace and Park Entrance TicketPena sits above Sintra in yellow and red, and the last stretch is uphill. Book the entry, then decide about the shuttle.
03The working palaceRoyal Palace Fast-Access Admission TicketMadrid still uses its state rooms, so a royal engagement closes them at short notice. Fast-access entry gets you past the longest queue in the city.
04The summer-only oneBuckingham Palace: The State Rooms Entrance TicketThe State Rooms open while the King is in Scotland, roughly July to October. Outside that window there is no way into the building.
The palace visits travellers actually take.
Every palace review →Eight buildings carry more visitors than the rest of the catalogue put together. What each ticket costs, how long it runs and why this one and not the one next door.
1
Doge’s Palace Reserved Entry Ticket
Use a reserved entry ticket to explore Doge’s Palace at your own pace, without a guide. See the gold staircase, Great Council Chamber, armory, prison rooms, and Bridge of Sighs. Your ticket also includes Museo Correr, the National Archaeological Museum, and Marciana Library, all valid for one day.
From · $41
Read our review →
2
Versailles Palace and Gardens Full Access Ticket
from $17
3
Alhambra & Nasrid Palaces Tour with Tickets
from $64
4
Pena Palace and Park Entrance Ticket
from $11
5
Alhambra and Nasrid Palaces Entry Ticket
from $33
6
Royal Palace Fast-Access Admission Ticket
from $26
7
Doge’s Palace & St. Mark’s Basilica with Terrace Access Tour
from $123
8
Skip-the-Line Tour of Palace and Gardens Access
from $76
Six countries that built more palaces than they could use.
Venetian republics, Bourbon kings, Moorish emirs and Habsburg archdukes all left buildings behind, and almost all of them now sell tickets. Six countries, and the best way through the door in each.
In Italy the palace belongs to the city, not the country.
No single royal house, so each place kept its own. Three Italian cities where the palace is the reason to stop, what the cheapest ticket into each one costs, and how long you need inside.
The gardens are usually the half nobody books.
Caserta runs its cascade for three kilometres. Schonbrunn hides a maze and a zoo behind the yellow facade. The Generalife was where the emirs went to get away from their own court. Grounds tickets cost less than state rooms and empty out earlier.
Venice sells the Doge’s Palace three different ways.
Everything in Venice →
A plain reserved-entry ticket, a combined pass that adds St Mark’s Basilica and the terrace, or a small-group walk that takes you over the Bridge of Sighs into the prisons. The building is the same. The queue, the hour and the price are not.
The palace plus the basilica terrace
One booking covers the ducal apartments and the loggia above St Mark’s, where the bronze horses stand and the square opens up underneath you. The two queues are the reason to buy them together.
Reserved entry, nothing else
The cheapest way through the door, and in high summer the difference between twenty minutes and ninety. You walk the Golden Staircase and the chambers at your own pace, with no guide talking.
The chancellery and the prisons
Behind the public rooms sits a warren of wooden offices, an interrogation chamber and the lead-roofed cells Casanova escaped from. It is a separate booking and it sells out first.
Same building, four different tickets.
A private guide, a timed skip-the-line slot, a plain entry ticket or an audio handset. The choice changes the price by a factor of five and changes what you understand by rather more than that.
What getting into a palace actually costs.
Every reviewed visit on the site, sorted by price. A surprising number of the great ones cost less than lunch beside them.
Plain entry tickets, audio-guided rooms and the grounds-only passes. Most single palaces sit here.
Guided state rooms, skip-the-line combinations and the day trips out to Versailles, Sintra or Caserta.
Private guides, after-hours access and the full-day runs that take in two or three houses.
Half a palace visit is knowing which rooms your ticket opens.
Grounds and state rooms are usually two different tickets. A royal residence still in use closes at a day’s notice. Sacred palaces enforce covered shoulders and knees at the gate. Photography stops at the door of the best room in the building more often than not. The fix is the same every time: read what the entry actually includes, and pick the hour rather than the day.
Sintra is a hillside with four palaces on it.
Pena in yellow and red at the top, Queluz in rococo pink at the bottom, the Moorish castle walls between them and Monserrate off to the side. The town is forty minutes from Lisbon and the road up is a queue by ten in the morning.
Every Portuguese palace day →
Three palace interiors nothing else copies convincingly.
Gilded ceilings are everywhere. A court built around running water, a mirrored gallery the length of a street, and a prison reached across a covered bridge are not.
The Court of the Lions
Twelve marble lions hold a basin at the centre of a courtyard laid out so that water runs from it along four channels, one to each hall. The carving around it is plaster cut into muqarnas, which is why so little of the Alhambra survives elsewhere in that state. Entry to the Nasrid Palaces is sold in half-hour slots and the slot is printed on your ticket, not chosen at the gate.
- 1Alhambra & Nasrid Palaces Tour with Tickets★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 19,801 reviews
- 2Alhambra and Nasrid Palaces Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 15,130 reviews
- 3Alhambra & Gardens Tour w/Nasrid Palaces Option★★★★★★★★★★ 4.2 · 7,022 reviews
The Hall of Mirrors
Seventeen arched windows face seventeen arcades of mirror, seventy-three metres end to end, and the glass was made in France specifically to stop Venice selling it. The room is on the standard palace route, so the ticket that gets you into the state apartments gets you into this. The palace closes on Mondays and the fountains only run on scheduled days.
- 1Versailles Palace and Gardens Full Access Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 41,579 reviews
- 2Skip-the-Line Tour of Palace and Gardens Access★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 10,429 reviews
- 3Versailles Palace & Gardens with Transportation★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 6,222 reviews
The Bridge of Sighs
The doge’s courts sat on one bank of the canal and the new prisons on the other, joined by a closed limestone bridge with two stone grilles for windows. The public route crosses it in one direction. The small-group itinerary goes the other way as well, through the wooden chancellery and up into the roof cells.
- 1Doge’s Palace Reserved Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 42,716 reviews
- 2Doge’s Palace & St. Mark’s Basilica with Terrace Access Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 10,697 reviews
- 3Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s Basilica Walking Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 6,291 reviews
Spain kept the palaces of two religions and runs both as museums.
The Alhambra is an emir’s hill fort with a garden palace inside it, and entry to the Nasrid rooms is rationed by the half hour. Madrid’s Palacio Real is the biggest royal building in western Europe and the King does not live in it. Seville put a Christian court inside a Moorish one and never took it apart.
- 1Alhambra & Nasrid Palaces Tour with Ticketsfrom $64
- 2Alhambra and Nasrid Palaces Entry Ticketfrom $33
- 3Royal Palace Fast-Access Admission Ticketfrom $26
Four palace tickets that do not wait for you.
Most museums will take your money at the door on the day. These four sell a fixed number of half-hour slots, close on set weekdays or open for part of the year only, and they are sold out weeks ahead in season.
- 01Alhambra & Nasrid Palaces Tour with TicketsThe Nasrid Palaces admit a capped number of visitors every half hour and your slot is fixed when you buy. There is no arriving early and no arriving late.
- 02Versailles Palace and Gardens Full Access TicketClosed on Mondays, and entry to the palace itself runs on timed slots. The gardens charge separately on the days the fountains are switched on.
- 03Pena Palace and Park Entrance TicketSintra caps how many people are inside Pena at once and sells entry by the half hour. The hill road jams long before the palace does.
- 04Grand Palace, Wat Pho, and Wat Arun Guided TourBangkok closes the gates at half past three and turns away bare shoulders and knees at the entrance. There is a sarong counter, and a long line for it.
Lisbon to Vienna, stopping at a palace in every city.
Lisbon
Madrid
Granada
Paris
ViennaBy city, from the busiest palace door down
By the kind of ticket you need
The palaces we walked through most recently.
The rest of this week’s additions →
Full-Day Châteauneuf du Pape Wines & Luberon Tour
Read our review →
Asia Continent & Topkapı Palace & Harem. Guided, Small group
Read our review →
Kornik Castle and Rogalin Palace Half-Day Private Tour
Read our review →
Royal Palace of Aranjuez Small-Group Tour with Entry Ticket
Read our review →
Antananarivo: Guided Tour and sunset in queen’s palace
Read our review →
Anagni: Entrance ticket to the Boniface VIII Palace
Read our review →
All-Inclusive Mutianyu Great Wall and Summer Palace Day Tour
Read our review →
