The tour begins with a general presentation of the history of water at Versailles and continues with a guided tour of the Filter Pavilion.
The Pavilion of filters built at the end of the reign of Louis XVI by the King’s Buildings Directorate to improve the quality of drinking water distributed at Versailles, constitutes an exceptional testimony of the hydraulic technique of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The water of Seine then, later the water of the Croissy boreholes, raised by the Marly Machine reached the pavilion by an underground aqueduct and was cleaned by gravity in successive bins to feed the city of Versailles, directly or via the Picardie basin and one of the Montbauron reservoirs. Redesigned with a charcoal filtering system and equipped with an aeration lantern at the end of the 19th century, the Pavilion of filters coupled to the Basin of Picardie was used until 1964.It is then abandoned and will be saved from ruin by its classification Historical monument in 1979. In 1996 it was fully restored by the Heritage Department.