Lake Palace
Lake Palace (formerly known as Jag Niwas) is a luxury hotel, which has 83 rooms and suites featuring white marble walls. The Lake Palace is located on the island of Jag Niwas in Lake Pichola, Udaipur, India, and its natural foundation spans 4 acres (16,000 m2). The hotel operates a speed boat which transports guests to the hotel from a jetty at the City Palace. It has been voted as the most romantic hotel in India and in the world.
The Lake Palace was built between 1743 and 1746 under the direction of the Maharana Jagat Singh II (62nd successor to the royal dynasty of Mewar) of Udaipur, Rajasthan as a winter palace. It was initially called Jagniwas or Jan Niwas after its founder.
The palace was constructed facing east, allowing its inhabitants to pray to Surya, the Hindu sun god, at the crack of dawn. The successive rulers used this palace as their summer resort, holding their regal durbars in its courtyards lined with columns, pillared terraces, fountains and gardens.
The walls made of black and white marbles are adorned by semi-precious stones and ornamented niches. Gardens, fountains, pillared terraces and columns line its courtyards.
The upper room is a perfect circle and is about 21 feet (6.4 m) in diameter. Its floor is inlaid with black and white marble, the walls are ornamented with niches and decorated with arabesques of colored stones, the dome is exquisitely beautiful in form.
During the famous Indian Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 several European families fled from Nimach and used the island as an asylum, offered to them by Maharana Swaroop Singh. To protect his guests, the Rana destroyed all the town’s boats so that the rebels could not reach the island.
By the later half of the 19th century, time and weather took their toll on the extraordinary water palaces of Udaipur. Pierre Loti, a French writer, described Jag Niwas as "slowly moldering in the damp emanations of the lake." About the same time bicyclists Fanny Bullock Workman and her husband William Hunter Workman were distressed by the ‘cheap and tasteless style’ of the interiors of the water palaces with "an assortment of infirm European furniture, wooden clocks, colored glass ornaments, and children’s toys, all of which seems to the visitor quite out of place, where he would naturally expect a dignified display of Eastern splendor."
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