Construction of the palace began around 1735 under Count Antal Grassalkovich I, a confidant of Empress Maria Theresa and one of the most ambitious patrons of his era, who chose this site in the hills outside the small town of Gödöllő for his country seat. The Grassalkovich family extended and enriched the palace across three generations, creating the elegant double-U-shaped layout that visitors still see today, the central ceremonial courtyard, the long wings of ground-floor state rooms, the Baroque chapel, and the formal gardens running away to the south. After the male line of the family died out in the early nineteenth century, the palace passed through several private hands before being purchased by the Hungarian government in 1867 as a coronation gift for the new royal couple. The state rooms of the visitor route follow the rhythm of this story, from the early-Baroque chapel and the Grassalkovich family apartments through the ornate reception halls to the carefully recreated private apartments of Sisi and Franz Joseph, with the famous Ceremonial Hall at the centre.

The defining personality of the palace, then and now, is Queen Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary (1837–1898), the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph and the queen who became known across Hungary as Sisi. Elisabeth first arrived in Gödöllő on 11 May 1867, immediately after her coronation in Budapest, and from that summer the palace became her favoured Hungarian residence. She found in Gödöllő a private world to which she could retreat from the rigid protocol of the Viennese court, riding daily in the surrounding parks, learning Hungarian, and spending long hours in the company of her favourite Hungarian friends and ladies-in-waiting. Her own apartments, including her famous violet bedchamber, her dressing room, her writing room, her private garden, and her veranda overlooking the park, have been carefully restored using period photographs and surviving inventories, and they remain the most-visited part of the palace today. A permanent exhibition dedicated to her life, My Sisi, traces her unusual personality and her deep connection to Gödöllő across both political and personal dimensions.

The Palace Park opens out behind the main facade as a 26-hectare landscape garden, originally laid out as a French Baroque parterre and later softened into a more naturalistic English-style park in the early nineteenth century. Long tree-lined paths, ornamental flowerbeds, fountains, statues, and quiet wooded sections give the park the feel of a small kingdom within a kingdom, with most of the original Baroque planting still recognisable across the layout. Within the park, a sequence of secondary buildings adds further layers to the visit. The Palm House (Pálmaház), built in the nineteenth century as a winter garden for the queen, has been recently restored with exotic plants and a small café. The Kinghill Pavilion (Kiráyi-domb), a small ornamental garden building on the highest natural rise in the park, was a favourite resting place during royal walks. The historic Riding Hall and adjoining stables, once home to the royal horses, are now used as a major concert and events venue. A small monument in the park also marks one of the more surprising afterlives of the palace: Horthy’s Bunker, a Second World War underground shelter built beneath the gardens for the wartime Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy, now open to visitors as a small Cold War-era museum.

Inside the palace, the cultural calendar revolves around the Baroque Theatre (Barokk Színház), one of the very few surviving eighteenth-century court theatres in central Europe. The theatre was created in the 1780s under the Grassalkovich family, fitted with original-period scenery, hand-operated stage machinery, and a small auditorium that retains the intimate scale of a private noble theatre. After decades of disuse, it has been carefully restored as an active performance venue, and today it hosts a regular programme of historically informed operas, chamber music, and theatrical works performed in conditions remarkably close to those of its original audiences. The palace also functions as one of Hungary’s leading conference and cultural event venues, with weddings, gala dinners, concerts, and seasonal exhibitions held throughout the year in the Ceremonial Hall, the Riding Hall, and the ceremonial yard. In 2025, the palace and its events welcomed around 350,000 visitors, with the surrounding park drawing another 800,000 to 900,000 guests across the season.

Gödöllő’s main HÉV station, Szabadság tér, sits directly opposite the palace, on the far side of the broad ceremonial yard. The walk from the HÉV station to the palace entrance takes less than five minutes along level streets. Travellers arriving by the faster MÁV train disembark at the main Gödöllő railway station, which lies on the southern edge of town around ten to fifteen minutes from the palace on foot or under five minutes by bike along largely flat, signposted streets. From either station, the palace, the park, and the secondary buildings such as the Palm House, the Kinghill Pavilion, the Baroque Theatre, and Horthy’s Bunker are all within easy walking distance of each other once on the grounds. Cycling infrastructure across the town of Gödöllő is reasonable, and the surrounding hills are crossed by marked cycle and hiking trails for travellers wanting to extend the visit further. Bike racks are available at both the HÉV and MÁV stations and at the palace. For onward travel, the same HÉV and MÁV services connect back toward Budapest and the wider Danube corridor, so Gödöllő works equally well as a half-day excursion, a full-day visit, or a relaxed overnight stop on the way out of the capital.