Explore Rundale

Why visit Rundale

Rundāle Palace is the Baltic's answer to Versailles and Schloss Schönbrunn rolled into one — a wonderfully restored 138-room Italian baroque pile that emerges, theatrically, out of flat Latvian farmland 75km south of Riga. Designed in the 1730s by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the same Italian architect who would go on to build the Winter Palace in St Petersburg for Tsarina Elizabeth, it was the summer residence of Ernst Johann von Biron — the Duke of Courland and one of the most powerful (and disliked) court favourites of imperial Russia. The palace fell into disrepair under Soviet rule (serving variously as a school, a grain store, and a kolkhoz centre) before a 50-year restoration project completed in the 2010s returned the state apartments to their full 18th-century splendour: the gilded Gold Hall (for receptions), the Marble Hall (for balls), the Rose Drawing Room and a sequence of jewel-coloured suites for guests. The 10-hectare formal French garden, with its Green Theatre topiary amphitheatre, sunken Rose Garden (with 2,250 historic varieties), and box-hedged geometric parterres, is the largest of its kind in northern Europe — the original 18th-century layout was painstakingly recreated. Combine with a visit to the cathedral at Bauska and the late-medieval Bauska Castle ruins nearby.