Palace of the Grand Master

How to visit without overpaying

The first thing to know is the ticket maths. The single palace ticket is €20, but the €10 combined ticket covers four Old Town sites — the palace, the Archaeological Museum at the bottom of the Street of the Knights, the Decorative Arts Collection and Our Lady of the Castle. It is half the price for four times the access, so unless you are genuinely only here for the palace and walking straight back to your hotel, buy the combined one. EU under-25s and non-EU under-18s go free, as does everyone on the first Sunday of the month between November and March.

The palace sits at the top of the Street of the Knights (Ippoton), at the highest northwest corner of the Old Town. You cannot drive inside the medieval walls, so you arrive on foot from the harbour or one of the gates either way — follow the cobbled, slightly uphill Street of the Knights and the gatehouse with its two round towers is at the end. Go in the morning in summer: the stone is cooler, the halls are quieter, and you avoid the cruise-day crush that builds through the middle of the day.

What’s actually inside, and is it worth it?

Be clear-eyed about what you’re seeing. The medieval palace was largely destroyed by a gunpowder explosion in 1856, and what stands today is a 1930s reconstruction built by the Italians as a residence for their governor (and a planned holiday home for Mussolini that was never used). So it is not a furnished crusader castle — it’s an imposing shell with a museum inside.

The reason to go up the stairs is the first-floor rooms paved with ancient mosaic floors, lifted wholesale from the neighbouring island of Kos and reinstalled here — genuinely beautiful, and the palace’s single best feature. The ground floor holds two strong permanent exhibitions on the ancient and medieval city that reward twenty minutes of reading. Allow about an hour for the palace alone, or half a day if you fold in the Archaeological Museum on the same combined ticket.

It earns its place as the headline indoor sight of the Old Town, especially on the combined ticket — but manage expectations on the reconstruction, and make the Kos mosaics the thing you actually come up to see.