Orangery of the Palace of Versailles

A first orangery was built at Versailles by Louis Le Vau in 1663, before the great campaigns on the palace itself. After the fall of the finance minister Nicolas Fouquet in 1661, more than a thousand orange trees from his estate at Vaux-le-Vicomte joined the royal collection, which went on growing.

Le Vau's building soon proved too small and was replaced by Jules Hardouin-Mansart's orangery, built between 1684 and 1686; some sources extend the works to 1688. Mansart doubled the original building in both length and breadth, drawing on the principles of Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, head of the king's fruit and kitchen gardens. The building closes the southern vista of the gardens, between the two monumental staircases known as the Hundred Steps.

The collection was continually renewed, numbering several thousand trees by the 1790s. In 1871, after the Paris Commune, the Orangery served as a holding prison for insurgents before their transfer to the camp at Satory. More recently the palace has restored its surroundings: the gates, the Hundred Steps between October 2021 and the end of 2022, and then the four monumental sculpture groups inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, carved around 1687 by Louis Le Conte and Pierre Legros, which were restored in a former warehouse at Mantes-la-Jolie.

The Orangery is partly sunk into the ground beneath the South Parterre, which shields it from draughts. Its central gallery, more than 150 metres long, is covered by a vault 13 metres high; two side galleries of about 117 metres run beneath the Hundred Steps. The walls are 4 to 5 metres thick, and tall arched windows with double frames open the façade to the south.

The building is not heated: thick masonry, orientation and double glazing keep the winter temperature at no lower than about 5 °C. To avoid opening the great doors, whose joints were sealed, gardeners used small cat-flap doors. Its restrained stone architecture is a deliberate contrast to the splendour of the palace. In front stretches the lower parterre, about three hectares, laid out around a circular pool and six lawns.

In winter the Orangery holds more than a thousand trees in boxes: the palace counts 1,055. Alongside the orange trees, some from Portugal, Spain and Italy, are lemons, palms, oleanders, pomegranates, olives and eugenias. Some specimens are over two hundred years old.

In the warmer months, generally from May to October, the boxes are wheeled out and set on the parterre, where they form the geometric pattern typical of the French formal garden. Inside the gallery stands Bernini's equestrian statue of Louis XIV, which Girardon transformed into a Marcus Curtius.

The Orangery lies south of the palace, below the South Parterre, with a view down to the Pièce d'eau des Suisses. The Orangery parterre can be reached free of charge from the gardens, while the gallery itself opens only occasionally, for instance during the Rendez-vous aux jardins in early June. The best time is May to October, when the trees are out on the parterre. The view from the terrace of the South Parterre and the descent by the Hundred Steps are part of the experience.