Rundāle Palace is Latvia's great monumental surprise: a Baroque and Rococo palace of imperial proportions set in the middle of Zemgale's flat farmland, far from any big city. It was designed by Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, the Italian architect at the Russian court who built the Winter Palace and the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg. That's why Rundāle has the feel of an imperial residence, which is the last thing you expect to find in a small Baltic village. The nickname 'the Latvian Versailles' is no exaggeration.
It was the summer residence of Ernst Johann von Biron, Duke of Courland and favourite of Empress Anna of Russia. Inside it's a riot of stucco, frescoes, gilded halls, porcelain and period furniture, restored with a goldsmith's patience over several decades. Outside, a French garden with geometric parterres, rose gardens with thousands of historic varieties and an ornamental woodland complete the ensemble. It is easily the most beautiful palace in the country and one of the great Baroque buildings of the Baltics.
This guide takes a practical look at Rundāle: which halls you shouldn't miss, when the roses bloom, how to get there from Riga, how much tickets cost and how to combine it with Bauska Castle on the same trip. Whether you come for the architecture or the gardens, Rundāle is one of those places that justifies a trip out of the capital all by itself.
Rundāle Palace was built between 1736 and 1768 for Ernst Johann von Biron, Duke of Courland, to plans by Bartolomeo Rastrelli. Designed as a summer residence, it shared its owner's turbulent fate: Biron fell from favour and was exiled to Siberia, work stopped and only resumed years later. After Russia annexed Courland in 1795, the palace passed through the hands of Russian nobles, was looted during the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, and was badly damaged in the Soviet era, when it was even used as a granary and a school. The great restoration began in 1972 under the legendary director Imants Lancmanis and turned Rundāle into the dazzling palace museum it is today. We cover all of this on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Semigallia of the warriors who held out for a century and its baroque palaces, alongside Catholic, Polish-influenced Latgale, the most distinctive region of Latvia.
Read the history of Zemgale and Latgale: palaces and the east →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 11 activities in Riga. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Rundāle Palace doesn't begin with stones or plans. It begins with one of the most famous power relationships of the 18th-century Baltic: the one between Ernst Johann von Biron and Empress Anna of Russia. Biron was born in 1690 in Courland, the small duchy under Polish-Lithuanian overlordship that covered much of what is now western Latvia. His family belonged to the lesser Baltic German nobility. His rise was meteoric. He became the favourite and trusted confidant of Anna Ivanovna, Duchess of Courland, and when Anna was crowned Empress of Russia in 1730, Biron rose with her to the very top of imperial power.
Russian history calls the 1730s the 'Bironovshchina' (the 'Biron era'), and during that decade this Courland nobleman was in practice one of the most powerful men in the empire. In 1737 the empress herself manoeuvred to have Biron elected Duke of Courland and Semigallia, sending him back to his homeland as its ruler. A man with so much power and so much ambition needed a symbol to match, and that symbol was a palace.
Biron commissioned not one but two grand residences: the palace of Jelgava (Mitau), the duchy's capital, and a summer residence in the Zemgale countryside, at a place called Rundāle. For both projects he hired the best architect in the Russian orbit: the Italian Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, the star of St Petersburg's imperial Baroque.
Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700-1771) is one of the great names in 18th-century European architecture. The son of an Italian sculptor, he trained and worked in the service of the Russian court, where he went on to design colossal buildings such as the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo and Smolny Cathedral. Rundāle is one of his first major mature works, and it already shows his full Baroque vocabulary: monumental symmetry, a central block with wings, courts of honour and lavish decoration.
The foundation stone of Rundāle was laid in 1736. Rastrelli designed a U-shaped palace around a court of honour, with more than a hundred rooms, intended as a summer residence surrounded by gardens. Craftsmen and materials were brought in from across the region and from St Petersburg, and work moved along at a good pace during the first few years, alongside the twin project of the Jelgava palace.
But Rundāle's fortunes were tied to Biron's, and those were fragile. Empress Anna died in 1740. Biron tried to hold on to power by having himself named regent of the empire, but barely three weeks later he was overthrown in a palace coup, arrested and sentenced. His fall was as brutal as his rise had been: Biron and his family were exiled to Siberia. Work on Rundāle came to an abrupt halt, with the palace still unfinished.
For more than twenty years Rundāle stood as a stone skeleton in the middle of the Zemgale countryside while its owner wasted away in exile. Biron's luck only turned in 1762, when the new empress, Catherine II the Great, rehabilitated him soon after taking the throne and gave him back the Duchy of Courland. By then an old man, Biron returned home and took up his two great unfinished building projects again.
Meanwhile Rastrelli had fallen out of favour at the Russian court as tastes shifted towards Neoclassicism, and he went back to working for his former patron. Between 1764 and 1768 the interior decoration of Rundāle was completed, this time by a team of first-rate artists. The Italian painter Francesco Martini and his collaborator Carlo Zucchi painted the ceiling frescoes, and the German sculptor and stucco artist Johann Michael Graff created the dazzling stucco reliefs that still amaze visitors today in the White Hall and dozens of other rooms.
The result was an extraordinarily rich Baroque and Rococo ensemble: the Gold Hall as the throne room, the White Hall as the ballroom, long enfilades of rooms, porcelain stoves, silks and gilding. Biron didn't get to enjoy his finished palace for long, as he died in 1772. The duchy passed to his son Peter von Biron, who lived mainly in Jelgava and used Rundāle as a secondary residence. In 1795, with the Third Partition of Poland, Courland was annexed by the Russian Empire and the duchy ceased to exist.
After the Russian annexation, the palace and its lands no longer belonged to the dukes. Catherine the Great gave Rundāle to one of her favourites, and throughout the 19th century the palace passed through several Russian noble families, among them the Zubovs and later the Shuvalovs, who kept it as a manor residence. During that period it stayed in relatively good condition, although it lost part of its furniture and its original purpose.
The heavy blows came with the wars. During the Napoleonic Wars, as troops moved through the region in 1812, the palace was damaged and looted. The First World War was far worse. The Eastern Front ran through Courland and Zemgale, and Rundāle was occupied, used as barracks and a military hospital, and plundered. Between 1915 and 1919 the area saw fighting, German occupation and then the Latvian War of Independence, and the palace came out of it badly damaged.
When the First Republic of Latvia became independent (1918-1940), Rundāle passed to the Latvian state and was put to various uses, including a school. But the Second World War and the Soviet post-war years brought fresh humiliations for Biron's old palace. In the Soviet era it was even used as a grain store, a warehouse and a school, with its Baroque halls run down and its decoration at risk of being lost forever. Rundāle seemed doomed to slow ruin.
Rundāle's revival is one of the great heritage conservation stories in all of Eastern Europe, and it has a name: Imants Lancmanis. In 1972, at the height of the Soviet era, the Rundāle Palace Museum was founded and a restoration began that would last for decades. Lancmanis, an art historian, ran the museum from then on and became the soul of the project. He set out to give the palace back its 18th-century Baroque appearance, room by room. That meant researching documents, reviving traditional craft techniques, and rebuilding stucco, gilding, upholstery, stoves and frescoes with a patience and rigour that astonished specialists.
The restoration moved slowly and was always short of money, first under the Soviet regime and then, after Latvia regained its independence in 1991, as one of the emblems of the national heritage. The French garden was also restored following Rastrelli's original plans, with its geometric parterres and a rose collection that now ranks among the most important in northern Europe. Restoration of the state rooms was largely considered complete around 2014-2015, more than forty years after it began.
Today Rundāle Palace is the most visited palace museum in Latvia and one of the country's top attractions. It's a miniature piece of imperial Baroque set down in the Baltic countryside, with gilded halls, rose gardens and a story that runs from a tsarina's favourite to Siberian exile, from wartime looting to a Soviet granary, and from there to a painstaking revival led by a handful of stubborn restorers who loved the place. The nickname 'Latvian Versailles' fits it well: few places tell the splendour and the tragedies of ducal Courland better.
