Peterhof by Hydrofoil with the Fountain Park

About the tour

Peter I conceived Peterhof in 1715 as a residence that would surpass Versailles. What emerged was something more: 147 working fountains, 102 hectares of Lower Park, and a forty-kilometre water conduit still running today without a single pump — on nothing but the fall from the Ropsha heights. The ensemble has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1990.

We travel there the way people originally did — by sea. The Meteor is a hydrofoil developed in Rostislav Alexeyev’s design bureau: the first was launched in 1959, more than four hundred were built afterwards, and they were sold to a couple of dozen countries. Under way, the hull lifts clear of the water and runs on its foils at 60–65 kilometres an hour, almost without pitching. The trip to Peterhof takes about forty minutes each way — instead of an hour or more by road, and with none of the traffic leaving the city.

We meet at the landing stage by the Winter Palace and return the same way.

What you will see

• The panorama of St Petersburg from the water — the reason people choose this version: the city from the gulf, the facades along the embankments, the reclaimed land on Vasilyevsky Island, the Lakhta Centre and the Gazprom Arena. Soft seats, panoramic windows, forty minutes of view.

• The Grand Cascade — the centre of the whole composition: marble terraces, balustrades, more than two hundred gilded bronze figures, and dozens of jets washing over all of it at once.

• Samson — a monument to the victory at Poltava: the battle fell on St Sampson’s day, so the lion in the hero’s hands is Sweden. The jet reaches twenty metres.

• The Chessboard Hill cascade — a sheet of water over black and white steps, with painted winged dragons at the mouth of the grotto. Beside it stand the paired Roman fountains, faced in marble: inspired by the fountains of the Vatican, but not a copy.

• The trick fountains — water games devised by Peter himself: jets go off unexpectedly and out of nowhere. The oldest, the Little Sofas, have worked since 1723. Children are delighted; adults get wet.

• The Pyramid fountain — the most water-hungry at Peterhof: 505 jets, around a hundred litres a second, seven tiers of foam.

• The Lion Cascade and the Golden Hill — a classical colonnade with waterfall steps, the only one set on a terrace rather than a slope, and a marble staircase whose vertical faces are sheathed in gilded copper sheet: the water positively blazes.

• The Favourite fountain — a little dog chases ducks in a circle; the barking and quacking came from copper tubes with reeds inside the figures, and the movement from a water wheel.

Why go with a guide

The Lower Park is two and a half kilometres along the gulf with a hundred and fifty fountains in it, and it is easy to walk in circles between them. A guide takes you along a route and explains what is not written up in the park: why the engineer Münnich chose this particular site and how the water arrives by gravity, how the trick fountains work and where to stand to stay dry, and how the imperial family lived here.

The war is a story of its own. Peterhof was occupied in the autumn of 1941, the cascades were smashed by artillery, and Samson vanished without trace. More than eight thousand decorative objects were evacuated in time; the rest had to be made anew. Restoration began in 1944, and by 1947 Samson was running again.

The tour is private: your guide works with your party alone, and hydrofoil tickets both ways and entry to the Lower Park are included.

Please note: the fountains run from late April to mid-October, and the hydrofoils operate only during the navigation season. Out of season we substitute a trip by car.