Peterhof and Tsarskoye Selo in One Day

About the tour

Eight hours and two country residences — Peterhof on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and the Catherine Palace in Pushkin. Most itineraries give them a day each; with a car and a guide they fit into one.

The residences are about forty kilometres apart, and nearly all the travelling time goes on the transfer from the southern shore of the gulf inland. The day is built so that you reach the Lower Park in the morning, soon after the fountains are switched on and before the crowds, and the palace in the afternoon.

Peterhof

Peter I founded the residence in 1711 and building began in 1712, with the first formal plan of the park drawn up by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Le Blond. Forty years later Rastrelli rebuilt the Grand Palace above the cascade — the same architect whose Catherine Palace you will see after lunch.

Water is the whole point of Peterhof. The Lower Park has 147 working fountains today, and not one of them is driven by a pump: the water arrives by gravity from the Ropsha springs twenty-four kilometres away. The canal was begun in January 1721 and the water reached the park on 8 August of that same year. The difference in elevation has been doing the engineers’ work ever since.

• The Grand Cascade and Samson — the central figure was installed in 1735 to mark the victory at Poltava in 1709: the battle fell on St Sampson’s day, and the lion in Samson’s hands is the coat of arms of Sweden. The original was taken away and lost during the war; the present statue was recreated in 1947.
• The Sea Canal — the axis of the whole ensemble, running from the cascade straight out into the Gulf of Finland, and the source of the view most people come here for.
• The trick fountains — the “Little Sofas” date from 1721–1723 and the “Little Fir Tree” appeared in 1784 under Catherine II. They fire when a visitor steps on the right stone, and work exactly as they did two hundred years ago.
• The Lower Park — 102 hectares, laid out as a triangle running two and a half kilometres along the shore and half a kilometre deep.

German forces occupied the park in the autumn of 1941 and the cascades were almost completely destroyed by artillery. The park reopened to visitors as early as 1945, the fountains were restarted in 1946, and a restored Samson returned to his place on 14 September 1947.

The Catherine Palace and the Amber Room

The palace was laid down in 1717 under Catherine I, and took its present form under Rastrelli, who rebuilt it between 1752 and 1756 and presented it to Empress Elizabeth on 30 July 1756. The facade runs for 325 metres, and the gilding of the exterior decoration alone took more than a hundred kilograms of gold — a level of extravagance that struck even contemporaries as excessive.

The Amber Room is older than the palace itself. Work began in 1701 for the Prussian king Friedrich I, led by the Dane Gottfried Wolffram and finished by the Danzig masters Ernst Schacht and Gottfried Turau. In 1716 Friedrich Wilhelm I made a gift of the panels to Peter I, and they arrived in St Petersburg in 1717. Empress Elizabeth ordered them installed at Tsarskoye Selo in 1743; Rastrelli added mirrored pilasters and gilded carving, and by 1770 the room had acquired the form known from photographs.

In October 1941 the panels were removed to Königsberg Castle, where they remained until April 1945 — after which the trail goes cold. The decision to recreate the room was taken in April 1979, work began in 1981 and took more than twenty years: the Amber Room as it stands now opened in 2003, for the city’s tercentenary. Part of the cost was met by the German company E.ON Ruhrgas.

The rest of the palace is Rastrelli’s Golden Enfilade, inlaid parquet floors with mother-of-pearl, and tiled stoves. By 1947, 6,682 museum objects had been recovered from evacuation and other stores; restoration continues to this day.

How the day runs

• 9:00 — meet your guide in the hotel lobby
• 9:00–10:00 — transfer to Peterhof (optionally by hydrofoil, at extra cost)
• 10:00–12:00 — walk through the Lower Park and the fountains
• 12:30–13:30 — lunch at a Russian restaurant (paid separately)
• 13:30–14:30 — transfer to Pushkin
• 14:30–16:00 — guided visit to the Catherine Palace and the Amber Room
• 16:00–17:00 — return to the city, drop-off at your hotel

Why go with a guide

Both sites are among the most visited in Russia, and the hard part here is logistics rather than commentary: the Catherine Palace admits visitors in timed slots, the Lower Park has its own schedule for switching the fountains on, and the transfer between them has to be timed around both. We handle the tickets and the timing.

The tour is private, so the pace, the length of each stop and the order of the day adjust to you. Lunch is not included, and the hydrofoil to Peterhof is paid separately if you want it.