Top 10 Things to Do in St. Petersburg

The Peter and Paul Fortress (Petropavlovskaya krepost) is the original nucleus of St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great on Zayachy Island in the Neva delta in 1703 and the first permanent structure of the new city. Its Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, with its golden spire reaching 122.5 metres — the tallest Orthodox bell tower in the world for a time — contains the tombs of all Russian emperors from Peter the Great to Nicholas II. The fortress also served as a political prison for centuries, holding notable inmates including Dostoyevsky, Gorky, and Leon Trotsky.

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (Khram Spasa-na-Krovi) is St. Petersburg's most flamboyant landmark, a richly decorated Russian Revival church built on the exact spot on the Griboedov Canal where Tsar Alexander II was fatally wounded by a bomb in 1881. Its exterior of elaborately patterned enamel tiles and mosaics makes it look like a piece of Moscow's St. Basil's Cathedral transplanted to the classical streetscapes of St. Petersburg. The interior is covered by over 7,000 square metres of mosaics, making it one of the largest mosaic collections in the world.

Peterhof (Petergof) is a complex of palaces and gardens on the Gulf of Finland, 30 kilometres west of St. Petersburg, built by Peter the Great as Russia's answer to Versailles and rightly called the "Russian Versailles." The centrepiece is the Grand Cascade, a spectacular series of 64 fountains, 142 water jets, and 255 bronze statues flowing down to the sea, fed entirely by natural water pressure without pumps — an 18th-century engineering marvel. The Grand Palace and its golden state rooms were heavily damaged in World War II and have been meticulously restored to their former magnificence.

Catherine Palace (Yekaterininskiy dvorets) in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), 25 kilometres south of St. Petersburg, is one of Russia's most dazzling Baroque palaces, with a 300-metre-long cerulean blue, white, and gold facade. Built for Empress Elizabeth and completed in 1756, the palace is most famous for the legendary Amber Room, a chamber with walls entirely clad in amber panels with gold leaf and mirrors, originally created for Friedrich I of Prussia — the Eighth Wonder of the World stolen by the Germans in 1941 and recreated in a 25-year restoration completed in 2003. The palace is surrounded by 100 hectares of formal and English landscape gardens.

The State Russian Museum (Gosudarstvenny Russky muzey) is the world's largest dedicated museum of Russian fine art, with a collection of over 400,000 works spanning from ancient Russian icons of the 12th century to contemporary works. Housed primarily in the grand Neoclassical Mikhailovsky Palace (1825), it includes masterpieces of Russian painting by Repin, Surikov, Aivazovsky, Serov, Vrubel, and Malevich — including one of the key versions of Malevich's Black Square. It is often overshadowed by the Hermitage but is essential for understanding Russian artistic identity.

Nevsky Prospekt is St. Petersburg's great main avenue, a 4.5-kilometre boulevard stretching from the Admiralty building to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, lined with palaces, churches, hotels, restaurants, bookshops, and cafes. Gogol called it "the universal communication of St. Petersburg" and it remains the city's social and commercial artery, home to the Kazan Cathedral, the elegant Singer Bookshop (in the former Singer Company building), the Passage department store, and the Grand Hotel Europe. The avenue is at its most magical during the White Nights, when the sky never fully darkens.

The Mariinsky Theatre is one of the world's supreme opera and ballet companies, the historic stage in St. Petersburg where Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Nutcracker, and the operas of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Prokofiev had their world premieres. The original 1860 theatre building, with its sky-blue and gold interior, remains one of the world's most beautiful opera houses; it was joined in 2013 by the striking Mariinsky II and the Mariinsky Concert Hall in an adjacent complex. The company produced many of the 20th century's greatest ballet dancers, from Nijinsky to Nureyev and Baryshnikov.

The White Nights (Belye nochi) of St. Petersburg are the phenomenon during which the sky never fully darkens from late May to mid-July due to the city's high northerly latitude of 60°N — the same latitude as Alaska — creating an eerie, luminous twilight that persists through the night. The city celebrates with the White Nights Festival, a celebrated arts festival of opera, ballet, and concerts, and the Scarlet Sails (Alye Parusa) graduation ceremony, in which a tall ship with scarlet sails sails into the Neva as part of an elaborate pyrotechnic and light show watched by 1.5 million people on the embankments. For first-time visitors the experience of reading by natural light at midnight is genuinely otherworldly.

Kazan Cathedral (Kazansky Sobor) is one of the grandest churches in St. Petersburg, a monumental neoclassical cathedral built between 1801 and 1811 by the Russian architect Andrei Voronikhin, its 96-column curved colonnade inspired by Bernini's colonnade at St. Peter's in Rome. The cathedral houses the revered icon of Our Lady of Kazan, one of the most sacred icons in Russia, and serves as the burial place of Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, whose victory over Napoleon in 1812 is commemorated in reliefs and trophies within. It stands on Nevsky Prospekt and its colonnade forms one of the most photographed architectural set pieces in Russia.

The Peter and Paul Fortress (Petropavlovskaya krepost) is the original nucleus of St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great on Zayachy Island in the Neva delta in 1703 and the first permanent structure of the new city. Its Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, with its golden spire reaching 122.5 metres — the tallest Orthodox bell tower in the world for a time — contains the tombs of all Russian emperors from Peter the Great to Nicholas II. The fortress also served as a political prison for centuries, holding notable inmates including Dostoyevsky, Gorky, and Leon Trotsky.

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (Khram Spasa-na-Krovi) is St. Petersburg's most flamboyant landmark, a richly decorated Russian Revival church built on the exact spot on the Griboedov Canal where Tsar Alexander II was fatally wounded by a bomb in 1881. Its exterior of elaborately patterned enamel tiles and mosaics makes it look like a piece of Moscow's St. Basil's Cathedral transplanted to the classical streetscapes of St. Petersburg. The interior is covered by over 7,000 square metres of mosaics, making it one of the largest mosaic collections in the world.

Peterhof (Petergof) is a complex of palaces and gardens on the Gulf of Finland, 30 kilometres west of St. Petersburg, built by Peter the Great as Russia's answer to Versailles and rightly called the "Russian Versailles." The centrepiece is the Grand Cascade, a spectacular series of 64 fountains, 142 water jets, and 255 bronze statues flowing down to the sea, fed entirely by natural water pressure without pumps — an 18th-century engineering marvel. The Grand Palace and its golden state rooms were heavily damaged in World War II and have been meticulously restored to their former magnificence.

Catherine Palace (Yekaterininskiy dvorets) in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), 25 kilometres south of St. Petersburg, is one of Russia's most dazzling Baroque palaces, with a 300-metre-long cerulean blue, white, and gold facade. Built for Empress Elizabeth and completed in 1756, the palace is most famous for the legendary Amber Room, a chamber with walls entirely clad in amber panels with gold leaf and mirrors, originally created for Friedrich I of Prussia — the Eighth Wonder of the World stolen by the Germans in 1941 and recreated in a 25-year restoration completed in 2003. The palace is surrounded by 100 hectares of formal and English landscape gardens.

The State Russian Museum (Gosudarstvenny Russky muzey) is the world's largest dedicated museum of Russian fine art, with a collection of over 400,000 works spanning from ancient Russian icons of the 12th century to contemporary works. Housed primarily in the grand Neoclassical Mikhailovsky Palace (1825), it includes masterpieces of Russian painting by Repin, Surikov, Aivazovsky, Serov, Vrubel, and Malevich — including one of the key versions of Malevich's Black Square. It is often overshadowed by the Hermitage but is essential for understanding Russian artistic identity.

Nevsky Prospekt is St. Petersburg's great main avenue, a 4.5-kilometre boulevard stretching from the Admiralty building to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, lined with palaces, churches, hotels, restaurants, bookshops, and cafes. Gogol called it "the universal communication of St. Petersburg" and it remains the city's social and commercial artery, home to the Kazan Cathedral, the elegant Singer Bookshop (in the former Singer Company building), the Passage department store, and the Grand Hotel Europe. The avenue is at its most magical during the White Nights, when the sky never fully darkens.

The Mariinsky Theatre is one of the world's supreme opera and ballet companies, the historic stage in St. Petersburg where Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Nutcracker, and the operas of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Prokofiev had their world premieres. The original 1860 theatre building, with its sky-blue and gold interior, remains one of the world's most beautiful opera houses; it was joined in 2013 by the striking Mariinsky II and the Mariinsky Concert Hall in an adjacent complex. The company produced many of the 20th century's greatest ballet dancers, from Nijinsky to Nureyev and Baryshnikov.

The White Nights (Belye nochi) of St. Petersburg are the phenomenon during which the sky never fully darkens from late May to mid-July due to the city's high northerly latitude of 60°N — the same latitude as Alaska — creating an eerie, luminous twilight that persists through the night. The city celebrates with the White Nights Festival, a celebrated arts festival of opera, ballet, and concerts, and the Scarlet Sails (Alye Parusa) graduation ceremony, in which a tall ship with scarlet sails sails into the Neva as part of an elaborate pyrotechnic and light show watched by 1.5 million people on the embankments. For first-time visitors the experience of reading by natural light at midnight is genuinely otherworldly.

Kazan Cathedral (Kazansky Sobor) is one of the grandest churches in St. Petersburg, a monumental neoclassical cathedral built between 1801 and 1811 by the Russian architect Andrei Voronikhin, its 96-column curved colonnade inspired by Bernini's colonnade at St. Peter's in Rome. The cathedral houses the revered icon of Our Lady of Kazan, one of the most sacred icons in Russia, and serves as the burial place of Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, whose victory over Napoleon in 1812 is commemorated in reliefs and trophies within. It stands on Nevsky Prospekt and its colonnade forms one of the most photographed architectural set pieces in Russia.