Rundāle Palace

Rundāle is the great baroque palace of Latvia, built between 1736 and 1740 as a summer residence for Ernst Johann Biron, duke of Courland, by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the architect who went on to build the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. It stands alone in flat farmland with no town around it. The Gilt Hall and the White Hall were finished with stucco by the same craftsmen Rastrelli used in Russia. A formal French garden of ten hectares behind the palace was laid out to the original plans only in recent decades.