The Taj Lake Palace

PD Photos: The Taj Lake Palace, a luxury hotel located on Jag Niwas Island in the middle of Lake Pichola in Udaipur.

The Taj Lake Palace, formerly known as Jag Niwas Palace, is an unusual, unique luxury hotel of 83 rooms and suites, located on the Jag Niwas Island in the middle of Lake Pichola in Udaipur, India. It looks like a floating, huge palace in the middle of the lake.

The palace was built in the period 1743-46 by Maharana Jagat Singh II, the 62nd successor to the royal dynasty of Mewar, for use as his royal summer palace. The successive rulers also used the Lake Palace as their summer resort, holding their regal Durbars in its courtyards lined with columns, pillared terraces, fountains and gardens.

The palace is set against the backdrop of the majestic Aravalli Mountains on one side of the lake and lofty palaces on the other side. Built in marble, the walls are ornamented with arabesques of different colored stones as in the Taj Mahal at Agra.

During the reign of Bhopal Singh (1930-55) another pavilion, Chandra Prakash, was added. His successor Bhagwat Singh decided to convert the palace into Udaipur’s first luxury hotel.

In 1971, Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces (collective name for The Indian Hotels Company Limited and its subsidiaries owned by the Tata Group) took over management of the hotel. The Royal Butlers, the descendants of the original palace butlers, look after the comforts of the hotel guests.

The Lake Palace was featured in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy, as the floating palace of the fabulously wealthy woman Octopussy, played by Bond girl Maud Adams.

Palm house in Palace and Gardens of Schönbrunn

Photo: Palm house and the palmhouse parterre in Schönbrunn Palace's garden, Vienna, Austria.

The Beautiful Well, sculpture in Schonbrunn Garden

The Beautiful Well (Nymphe Egeria) is a sculpture in the Schönbrunn Garden of Schönbrunn Palace, a former imperial summer residence in Vienna, Austria. As it is one of the most important cultural monuments in Austria, it has become one of the major tourist attractions in Vienna. The palace and gardens illustrate the tastes, interests, and aspirations of successive Habsburg monarchs. The sculptures in the Schonbrunn Garden were mostly created between 1773 and 1780 under the direction of Johann Wilhelm Beyer, employing many sculptors.

The Dolmabahce Palace, Turkey

The Dolmabahçe Palace, or Dolmabahçe Sarayı in Turkish, in Istanbul, Turkey, located at the European side of the Bosporus, used to be the main administrative center of the Ottoman Empire from 1856 to 1922, except a twenty-year interval from 1889 to 1909 in which the Yıldız Palace was used. The Dolmabahce Palace was built between 1843 and 1856 under the orders of the Turkish Empire's 31st Sultan, Abdülmecid I. The 45,000 square meter mono-block palace stands on an area of 110,000 squire meters. Hacı Said Ağa was responsible for the construction work of the palace, while the project was conceptualized by architects Garabet Balyan, his son Nigoğayos Balyan and Evanis Kalfa.