Ubud

Updated August 2026

Ubud Palace

Fifteen minutes to walk round, free, and in the middle of town. Then at half past seven the courtyard fills, the gamelan starts, and it becomes something else entirely.

Photo Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0

Puri Saren Agung stands on the main crossroads of Ubud, directly opposite the market, and it is still the home of the town's royal family. What visitors see is the front of it: two courtyards with carved gates, guardian statues in checked cloth and open pavilions, deep red brick against grey stone. What visitors do not see is everything behind the gilded door at the back, because that is a house with people living in it.

That is the single fact that decides whether you leave satisfied. Arrive expecting a palace tour and fifteen minutes later you will be back on the pavement wondering what you missed. You missed nothing. There is no upstairs, no state rooms, no audio guide, and no ticket either, which is a fair trade.

The reason to put this in your plans rather than simply walk past it is the evening. From around half past seven the courtyard fills with plastic chairs, a gamelan orchestra sets up under the pavilion, and dancers perform a few metres in front of you with the palace itself as the set. That hour is the thing people remember about Ubud, and choosing the right night is most of what this page is for.

Three legong dancers in gold brocade performing at night in front of a gamelan orchestra in Ubud

From≈ €8/ pers.

The part of this that is worth booking

Free cancellation

Ubud evening dance performances

Duration: 1 h to 1 h 30From ≈ €8 / pers.

✓Legong, barong, kecak and Ramayana programmes across the central Ubud venues
✓Booked ahead you know which genre you are getting, which the gate queue does not tell you
✓Useful in July and August, when the small temple venues fill before the palace does
✓Free cancellation on most listings if your day runs long

See Ubud dance shows

Affiliate link. Booking through GetYourGuide costs you nothing extra and supports the guide. Prices are indicative and vary by option and season.

KEY POINTS

The verdict in 30 seconds

Free during the day, no ticket, no sarong, no gate. Fifteen minutes is the honest amount of time it holds.
The evening dance is the point. Ticketed, usually 19:30, roughly an hour to an hour and a half.
Arrive by 19:00 for the performance. The seating is flat and unnumbered, and the good rows go first.
People still live here. The courtyards you cannot enter are somebody's house, not a closed exhibit.
Not every show plays at the palace. Kecak in Ubud is generally staged at a temple courtyard a few minutes away.

What you actually walk into

Two courtyards, a pavilion, and a door that does not open. Knowing which is which turns a short visit into an interesting one.

The carved brick and stone gateway of Ubud Palace with gilded doors and two guardian statues in ceremonial cloth — The inner gateway at the back of the visitor courtyard. The gold doors are ceremonial and stay shut: everything past them is the family compound.

A Balinese compound is not a building, it is a walled set of separate structures arranged by function and by direction, and a puri is that same logic scaled up for a royal household. You enter through a split gate from the street, cross an outer courtyard, and are stopped by a roofed gateway with a demon face over the lintel. That gateway is the boundary, and it is where the visit ends.

Inside that boundary the detail is worth slowing down for. The brick is soft red and carved directly, which is unusual, and the panels along the low walls carry scenes that most people walk straight past while photographing the gate. The stone guardians wear black and white checked cloth, the poleng, which stands for the balance of opposites rather than for decoration.

The pavilion on the left as you come in is the one you will be looking at all evening if you come back for the dance. In daylight it is empty except for a few instruments under covers, and it is easier to see the gilt work on the beams then than it will be at night under a couple of spotlights.

Carved and gilded doorway flanked by guardian statues at a Balinese palace gateway in Ubud

What you can and cannot walk into

Seven parts of the compound, in the order you meet them coming in from the crossroads. Three of them are somebody's house, which is the thing to understand before you decide the visit was short.

The split gate on the street

Open to visitors

The first thing you walk through, a single tower sliced vertically in two with a gap between the halves. It marks the boundary between the ordinary street and the compound, and it is the reason the palace reads as an entrance rather than a facade. On the Ubud crossroads it opens straight onto the traffic, which is why so many photographs of it have a scooter in them.

On the spot: Stand across the road by the market to see it whole. From inside the courtyard you only ever get half of it.

GOOD TO KNOW

It closes without warning, and that is normal

Puri Saren Agung is a working family compound, so a cremation, a tooth filing ceremony or a temple anniversary can close the courtyards to visitors at a few hours' notice, sometimes for a whole day. There is nowhere reliable to check this in advance. If you find the gate shut, the rest of central Ubud is a two minute walk in any direction, and a ceremony visible from the street is more interesting than the courtyard you were going to see.

The evening dance, and how to choose one

Five genres are on sale in Ubud every night under names that mean nothing to a first time visitor. They are genuinely different from each other, and they do not all play here.

Which show is on tonight

Sellers around town will offer you five names on the same laminated card and explain none of them. This is what is actually behind each one, and which of them play in the palace courtyard rather than somewhere else in Ubud.

Legong

Regularly at the palace

The court dance the palace was built around

Two or three young women in gold brocade, moving in tiny precise increments: flicked fingers, snapped fans, and eyes that dart sideways on the beat. There is no plot you need to follow. The whole art is in control, and once you notice that the eye movements land exactly with the drum, the piece opens up.

What you hear

Full gamelan, bronze keys and gongs, sitting in a line behind the dancers. Loud, metallic and completely unamplified.

How long it runs

Roughly 60 to 90 minutes, usually a programme of five or six short pieces rather than one long story.

Where it plays

The palace courtyard is the home ground for this one. Puri Saren Agung was a royal court, and legong is court repertoire.

Best for

A first Balinese dance, and anyone who wants the palace itself in the background of what they are watching.

Worth knowing: It is slow by design. If you are expecting spectacle in the first ten minutes you will misread it as boring rather than as difficult.

Buying the ticket

Sold at the palace gate from late afternoon, and by sellers with a folding table along Jalan Raya Ubud all day. Same price either way, cash, no seat number.

When to arrive

Doors around 19:00 for a 19:30 start. Turning up at 19:25 puts you in row eight behind somebody standing up with a tablet.

Where to sit

The courtyard is flat and unraked. Centre of rows two to four, never the far edges, where half the choreography happens out of your line of sight.

What makes the palace courtyard worth choosing over a smarter venue is that nothing is produced. The orchestra sits on the ground in a line, the dancers come out from behind a curtain hung across the pavilion, and there is no amplification whatsoever. A gamelan is loud enough that it does not need any, and hearing bronze at that distance without a speaker in the chain is most of the experience.

The trade is comfort. You are on a plastic chair on flat paving for ninety minutes, the courtyard has no rake, and if a tall person sits in front of you in row three that is your evening. Mosquitoes come out at dusk and the palace is not going to spray for them, so put repellent on your ankles before you leave the hotel rather than after the first bite.

One thing to set expectations on: these are commercial performances staged for visitors, not temple rituals you have been allowed to observe. The troupes are local, the standard is often high, and the money supports the banjar that fields them. But the sacred versions of these dances happen on ceremony days, in temples, with no chairs and no tickets, and you would need a very different kind of luck to see one.

A legong dancer in pink and gold performing at night with the gamelan orchestra behind her — Legong, with the orchestra in the frame rather than in a pit. The fan, the flicked fingers and the sideways eyes are the whole vocabulary.

The barong creature in gold and shaggy white costume on a decorated Balinese stage at night — Barong. Two men inside one creature, and a story about the balance between good and harm rather than the victory of one over the other.

A circle of chanting men around a torch during a kecak performance at night in Ubud — Kecak, which uses no instruments at all. In Ubud this generally plays at a temple courtyard rather than in the palace.

Where each show actually plays

The ticket seller on the street sells for several venues at once and will not necessarily volunteer which one you are walking to. Central Ubud has five that matter, all within about fifteen minutes.

Venue	Where it is	What usually plays	The room
Ubud Palace, Puri Saren Agung	The main crossroads, opposite the market	Legong, Ramayana ballet, mixed masked programmes	Flat courtyard, plastic chairs, the gilded pavilion behind the dancers
Pura Taman Saraswati	Two minutes west, behind the lotus pond	Legong and mixed programmes, occasionally kecak	Raised temple stage across a lotus pond, the prettiest room in town
Pura Dalem Taman Kaja	About fifteen minutes north on foot	Kecak and fire dance	Temple courtyard, torchlight, no electric stage lighting at all
Padang Tegal and Peliatan halls	South and east of the centre, a short ride	Barong, kecak, village troupe programmes	Community pavilions, mostly local audiences alongside visitors
ARMA museum	Pengosekan, south of the centre	Legong and kecak on a set weekly rota	Museum stage, more comfortable seating, higher ticket

The programmes rotate week to week and troupes swap venues, so treat that middle column as the tendency rather than a schedule. The boards outside the palace and along Jalan Raya Ubud carry the current week and they are kept up to date, because the people who print them are the people selling the tickets.

If you only have one free evening, the honest ranking is this: kecak at a temple courtyard first for sheer effect, legong at the palace second for the setting, and anything else third. If you have two evenings, do both of those, in that order, and the second one will be better for having seen the first.

Getting a seat worth having

Tickets are unnumbered, the courtyard is flat, and the chairs are set out in rows facing the pavilion. Everything about your evening is therefore decided by when you arrive rather than what you paid. Doors open around an hour before and the first twenty or so people in take the middle of rows two to four, which is the right answer.

Avoid the front row itself. It sounds like the prize and it is not: at that distance you are looking up, the dancers work the whole width of the space and you will spend the hour turning your head. Avoid the far left and right ends of any row for the same reason. The choreography is built for a frontal view because the court it was made for sat in one place.

Bring insect repellent, a layer if you feel the cool, and small notes. There is no bar, no interval service and no cloakroom. There is also, usefully, no rule against leaving quietly if you have had enough, and on a mixed programme of six short pieces plenty of people do.

Rain is the real variable. The audience seating is open to the sky while the performers are under a roof, so a wet season downpour at 19:20 either delays the start or moves everyone under the eaves. Shows are rarely cancelled outright, and nobody refunds for weather.

The raised pavilion used as a stage at Ubud Palace, empty in daylight with stone guardians in front — The same platform in daylight, with the gamelan instruments already in place at the back. In the evening the chairs go where this photograph was taken from.

What it costs

One of the very few sights on Bali where the honest answer to the entrance fee question is that there isn't one.

What you pay for	Detail	Order of magnitude
Daytime entry to the courtyards	No booth, no ticket, no sarong hire. You walk in from the pavement.	Free
Evening dance ticket	Same price at the gate or from a seller in the street. Cash, unnumbered seat.	≈ €6 to €10
Scooter parking nearby	Attendant-run spaces on the side streets. The palace has no visitor car park.	≈ €0.20
A driver waiting through the show	Only relevant if you are not staying in Ubud. Most people walk to this.	≈ €10 to €20

Every figure there is an order of magnitude rather than a price. Nothing is posted on a board, the dance ticket moves with the venue and the season, and it is all cash. Carry small notes: the seller at the gate on a busy night will not have change for a large one, and nobody here takes a card.

Watch for the one soft sell that exists. Some street sellers offer the dance ticket bundled with a car to a rice terrace or a temple during the day, at a price that is fine but not a discount. If you want the show, buy the show. If you want the driver, negotiate the driver.

Why a small town has a palace at all

Bali was never a single kingdom. It was a set of rival principalities, and Ubud was one of the smaller ones, a branch of the house of Sukawati that established itself here at the end of the eighteenth century. The compound you are standing in was laid out in the early nineteenth, and the ruler credited with it is Ida Tjokorda Putu Kandel.

The building is not as old as it looks. A major earthquake in 1917 flattened much of southern Bali and did serious damage here, and a great deal of what you see is the rebuilding that followed. That is common across the island and it is why so many Balinese structures combine genuinely old carving with twentieth century masonry.

The part that explains modern Ubud comes next. In the late 1920s and 1930s the family, and Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati in particular, deliberately opened the town to foreign artists, and hosted the painters and musicians whose work turned Ubud into the island's cultural address. Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet worked here under that patronage. The palace also began taking paying guests, which makes it one of the first pieces of tourist accommodation on Bali.

So the evening performance in the courtyard is not a recent bolt-on. A royal house sponsoring dance and music is what a puri did, and staging it for an audience of outsiders is a habit this particular family picked up roughly a century ago. That continuity is worth holding on to while you sit on the plastic chair.

The Ubud Palace gateway dressed for a ceremony with penjor, offerings and a red carpet leading to the gold doors — The same gateway dressed for a ceremony, with woven bamboo canopies over the courtyard. On days like this the visitor routine stops entirely.

The crossroads it sits on

Nobody comes to Ubud for the palace alone, and nobody should. It is the anchor of a walkable half day rather than a destination.

Across the road

Ubud market

A genuine produce and flower market before about nine in the morning, and a two storey souvenir hall for the rest of the day. The early version is worth setting an alarm for. The later one is worth ten minutes and firm haggling.

Two minutes west

Pura Taman Saraswati

The lotus pond temple, reached down a lane beside a cafe. This is the one people mean when they say the water palace, and it is the prettiest evening venue in town if the show you want is on there.

Ten minutes west

Campuhan ridge

The free ridge walk that starts inside town and is over by breakfast if you leave early enough. The natural first half of a day that ends at the palace.

Twenty minutes north

Tegallalang

The terraces everybody photographs, and the donation posts on the path that nobody warns you about. A morning out rather than a stop.

A day that actually works, in the order it works in: the Campuhan ridge walk at first light, the market before nine while it is still a market, the palace courtyards on the way back through town, an afternoon out of the heat, and the dance here at half past seven. That is roughly free until dinner.

If you have a driver for the day instead, the palace slots in at the end rather than the start. Tirta Empul and the Tegenungan waterfall are both within half an hour, and both want the morning. Come back into town for the late afternoon, eat early, and walk to the courtyard. The one arrangement to avoid is arriving here at noon with a car waiting, because fifteen minutes of palace in full sun is nobody's good memory of Ubud.

Hours, dress code and getting there

Hours

Courtyards open from roughly 08:00 to 18:00, then the chairs go out. Nothing is posted authoritatively and a family ceremony closes it without notice.

Dress

No sarong needed. This is a residence, not a temple. Shoulders covered and something past mid thigh is courteous and is all anyone expects.

How long

Fifteen to twenty minutes by day. Two hours door to door for an evening performance, including getting there early enough to sit well.

Getting there

On the junction of Jalan Raya Ubud and Jalan Suweta. Walk if you are staying in town. There is no car park, and the crossroads jams solid at dusk.

Arriving by car or ride hailing

The palace has no visitor parking of its own and the crossroads outside it is one of the worst pinch points in Ubud, particularly between five and eight in the evening. A driver will drop you on the corner and then need somewhere else to be.

Ride hailing apps work in Ubud but pickups from the immediate junction are awkward and sometimes discouraged by local drivers' arrangements. Walking two or three streets out before ordering a ride home is faster than arguing about it.

Arriving by scooter, or on foot

Attendant-run scooter parking sits on the side streets within a minute of the gate and costs almost nothing. It is the practical choice if you are staying out among the rice fields north or east of the centre.

Otherwise walk. Central Ubud is small, the palace is the middle of it, and every road you would take passes something worth stopping at. The pavements are uneven and the drains are open in places, so bring a phone torch for the walk home after the show.

Ubud Palace on Maps

Is it worth it, by traveller

The answer genuinely depends on who is asking, which is why the reviews average out to a shrug.

Yes, clearly

Staying in Ubud for two nights or more

You will walk past it several times whether you plan to or not, and the evening show is the best hour of culture available to you at this price, within walking distance of your dinner.

Yes, with children

Families, on the right programme

Barong and the Ramayana ballet hold a child's attention because there are monsters and a plot. Legong will not. Free courtyards by day mean nothing is lost if a visit lasts four minutes.

Yes, for the room

Anyone who cares about architecture

Carved soft brick, gilded timber and the whole logic of a Balinese compound, laid out at royal scale and available for nothing. Twenty slow minutes rewards you far more than fifteen fast ones.

Not really

Day trippers from the south coast

If you have driven ninety minutes from Seminyak with a car waiting, the palace is the weakest item on your list. Spend the time at the terraces or a waterfall and skip this.

Not really

Anyone expecting a palace tour

There are no rooms to walk through, no furniture, no guide and no interior. If that is what the word palace means to you, this will disappoint regardless of how good the carving is.

Depends

One night in Ubud only

Then choose the performance over the courtyards, and consider the kecak at a temple venue over the palace programme. The setting here is lovely, the chanting elsewhere is unforgettable.

NOTE

One misunderstanding worth clearing up

Ubud Palace and the water palace are not the same place, and the search results mix them constantly. Puri Saren Agung is the royal compound on the crossroads. The lotus pond people photograph belongs to Pura Taman Saraswati, a temple two minutes west, and there is a separate water palace at Tirta Gangga in the east of the island which is another thing again.

All three are worth seeing and none of them is a substitute for the others. If a tour itinerary lists just the water palace in Ubud, ask which one it means before you book it.

Ubud Palace: common questions

Is Ubud Palace free?

Yes. Walking into the front courtyards during the day costs nothing and there is no ticket booth, no donation desk and no sarong hire. The only thing you pay for at Puri Saren Agung is a seat at the evening dance performance, which is ticketed separately and sold at the gate from late afternoon.

Is Ubud Palace worth visiting?

In daylight, yes for fifteen minutes, because it costs nothing and it is on the crossroads you were going to walk through anyway. As a destination in its own right, no. What is genuinely worth planning an evening around is the dance performance in the courtyard, which is one of the best value hours on the island.

Who lives in the Ubud Palace?

The Sukawati family, the royal house of Ubud, still occupies the compound behind the visitor courtyards. They no longer hold political power, since the Indonesian republic ended the formal status of the Balinese royal houses, but they remain culturally prominent and the family head is still referred to locally as the prince of Ubud.

Is there a royal family in Ubud?

There is. Ubud was one of a set of small Balinese kingdoms, and the Sukawati line still lives at Puri Saren Agung. Their role today is ceremonial and cultural rather than governmental: they sponsor temple ceremonies, cremations and the arts scene that made the town's reputation in the first place.

Do I need to cover up for Ubud Palace?

No sarong is required and there is no dress code enforced at the gate, because this is a palace compound rather than a temple. Ordinary respectful clothing is fine: covered shoulders and something past mid thigh will never cause a problem. If you go into the family shrine areas or a ceremony is under way, dress as you would for a temple.

What time is the dance at Ubud Palace?

Performances generally begin around 19:30, with the gate opening about half an hour before. Programmes run roughly an hour to an hour and a half. There is a show most nights of the week, and the genre rotates, so ask which one is on rather than assuming you will get legong.

How much is the Ubud Palace dance ticket?

Expect something in the region of six to ten euros per person, paid in cash. The price is the same whether you buy it at the palace gate or from one of the sellers with a folding table along Jalan Raya Ubud. Seats are not numbered, which is why arrival time matters more than where you bought it.

How long do you need at Ubud Palace?

Fifteen to twenty minutes in daylight, and that is not a criticism: you are seeing two courtyards, a pavilion and a set of carved gates. For an evening performance, allow two hours from leaving your hotel, arriving by 19:00 for a 19:30 start.

What are the opening hours of Ubud Palace?

The visitor courtyards are generally accessible from around 08:00 until early evening, when the chairs go out for the performance. Nothing is posted authoritatively and the compound can close to visitors at short notice for a family ceremony, which happens more often than the guidebooks suggest.

Is Ubud Palace a temple?

It is not. Puri Saren Agung is a royal residence, which is why there is no sarong requirement and no purification etiquette at the entrance. It contains a family temple, as every Balinese compound does, and that part is not open to visitors. The lotus temple two minutes west, Pura Taman Saraswati, is the actual temple people often confuse it with.

Can you take photographs at Ubud Palace?

Freely in the visitor courtyards, including during the evening performance, where flash is discouraged rather than banned. The line to respect is the private compound and any ceremony taking place: photographing a family at prayer from a metre away is the one thing that will get you asked to stop.

Do you need to book Ubud Palace dance tickets in advance?

Not usually. Turning up at the gate an hour before the show works nearly every night of the year. Booking ahead matters in the July and August peak, and for the kecak performances at the temple venues, which are smaller and sell out more readily than the palace courtyard does.