The biggest Street View update ever includes palaces and Table Mountain

So, have you spent enough of your time swimming with turtles in Australia? Good… because Google has just released a batch of new special Street View collections which let you explore everything from Russian palaces and Canadian parks to Danish castles and South African nature reserves.

Street View programme manager Ulf Spitzer announced today that the team has released its “biggest ever update” and doubled the number of its Maps collections. Now you can see 360-degree interactive panoramic images of points of interest and historical sites in countries like South Africa, Japan, Spain, France, Brazil and Mexico. Some of the places you can wander around from the comfort of your desktop include Russia’s Catherine Palace, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taiwan, Stanley Park in Vancouver, Singapore’s Fort Canning Park and the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens and Table Mountain National Park in South Africa.

You can even tour the Elsinore / Kronborg Castle in Denmark, which was the setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In some of the locations, it’s more than just a panoramic image: you can actually navigate along the main walkways in Kirstenbosch, “walk” right up the path in front of the Catherine Palace and go inside the Kronborg Castle. Yes, it’s cool.

If you really feel like procrastinating exploring, you can scroll through the full list of Street View collections to experience the Colosseum in Rome or life inside a shed in the Antarctic.

Google has also updated over 250 000 miles (more than 400 000 kilometres) of actual roads in locations like Macau, Singapore, Sweden, the U.S., Thailand, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway and Canada, showing the type of time and resource investment that has made Google Maps the “best product in the industry.“