The elegant and impressive royal villa "Mon Repos" is of colonial architecture with many Greek and neoclassical elements. It is situated in the middle of Palaiopolis, where someone can see the ruins of the ancient city of Corfu. Its distance from the city center is only 3 kilometers and the whole estate covers the hill of Analipsi.
The palace was built in 1831 by the British High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands Frederic Adam as a gift to his Corfiot wife Nina Palatianou and it was designed by British architect Whitmore.
In 1864, after the union of the islands of the Ionian Sea with Greece, the municipality of Corfu, which owned the estate, gave the palace to the royal family in order to use it as a summer resort. King George the First was the one who named it "Mon Repos". This is the place where Empress Elisabeth of Austria, or Princess Sisi, was staying before she built Achilleion. In the palace Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elisabeth was born.
Mon Repos was also the place chosen as a summer resort from Parini, the Italian political governor of the Ionian Islands. The palace was used by the royal family until 1967 and in 1974 it was returned by the Greek government to the municipality of Corfu. That was the year when the former king of Greece, deposed by Greek people after a referendum, claimed Mon Repos as being his personal estate.
Greek courts decided in 1991 that the building belongs to the city of Corfu. While from 1995 it belongs to the Greek State which transformed it into the Paleopolis Archaeological Museum that is operating unfortunately with some breaks from 2000.