Lake Palace

Where it sits. The Lake Palace stands on a four-acre rock island in Lake Pichola, in the middle of Udaipur in southern Rajasthan, with the Aravalli hills behind it and the ramparts of the City Palace rising on the eastern shore. Its original name is Jagniwas. The building occupies essentially the whole island, so from any distance it appears to float, an effect helped by the white marble facade sitting only a metre or two above the waterline. There is no bridge: access is by launch from Bansi Ghat below the City Palace, a crossing of a few minutes. The palace faces east, which means the first sun of the day hits the front elevation and the best light for photography from the shore comes in the late afternoon from the western bank at Ambrai Ghat.

The story behind it. Maharana Jagat Singh II of Mewar built it between 1743 and 1746 as a summer retreat, on a rock his predecessors had used for moonlight picnics. The plan is a sequence of courtyards, colonnades, lily ponds and pavilions in black and white marble, with rooms named Bada Mahal, Phool Mahal and Khush Mahal, inlaid stone, mirrorwork and painted glass. During the 1857 uprising Maharana Swarup Singh sheltered European families from Neemuch on the island, which put it briefly in the imperial record. It then fell into disuse for decades. In 1963 Maharana Bhagwat Singh converted the palace into a hotel — the American-born designer Nanda Contractor, later known as Didi Contractor, worked on that conversion — and from 1971 it has been run by the Taj group, now with around eighty rooms and suites. Lake Pichola itself is older than the city: a grain trader called Pichhu dammed a stream here in the fourteenth century, and Maharana Udai Singh II enlarged the reservoir after founding Udaipur in 1559.

On screen. The Lake Palace plays the island headquarters of the title character in Octopussy (1983), John Glen's second Bond film and Roger Moore's sixth, shot in Udaipur in the autumn of 1982 with Maud Adams as Octopussy and Louis Jourdan as Kamal Khan. The palace is the base of an all-female circus and smuggling operation, and the production used the real building and its water approach extensively while building the character's private interiors at Pinewood. Around it the film mapped the rest of Udaipur:

• the Lake Palace as Octopussy's floating palace, with Bond approaching by water and the courtyards and colonnades appearing as themselves
• the Monsoon Palace on the ridge west of the city as Kamal Khan's residence
• Shiv Niwas Palace, within the City Palace complex, as the hotel where Bond stays
• Jag Mandir, the second island in Lake Pichola, for exterior party and arrival scenes
• the old city lanes near Jagdish Temple for the auto-rickshaw chase, and Lake Pichola itself for the boat pursuit

Forty years on, rooftop restaurants across Udaipur still screen the film nightly, which has become a local institution in its own right.

What you actually see. Non-residents cannot simply wander in; access is limited to hotel guests and to diners with a confirmed restaurant booking, which is worth knowing before planning a visit around it. From the water and the ghats, though, the palace is fully legible: the arcaded lower storey, the jharokha balconies, the domed pavilions at the corners, and the mango trees and frangipani in the courtyards visible over the parapet. Boat trips from Rameshwar Ghat and from the City Palace jetty circle the island and stop at Jag Mandir, whose seventeenth-century pavilion sheltered Prince Khurram — later the emperor Shah Jahan — during a revolt against his father in the 1620s.

A caution about the water. Lake Pichola is fed by monsoon runoff and by canal from the Fateh Sagar system, and in weak monsoon years the level drops dramatically; there have been summers when the lakebed around the island was cracked mud and boats could not run. After a good monsoon, from roughly September through the winter, the lake is full and the floating illusion works as intended.

Getting there and timing. Maharana Pratap Airport at Dabok is 22 kilometres east of the city, with flights from Delhi and Mumbai, and Udaipur City station has overnight trains from Delhi and Jaipur. October to March is the comfortable season, with clear light and cool evenings; April to June is fiercely hot, and the monsoon breaks in July. Late afternoon on the western ghats, when the marble turns amber and the hills behind go blue, is the view the palace was built to give.