Journey to St. Petersburg 6 days, 5 nights

May – September 2024

Arrival in St. Petersburg Meeting with your guide Transfer to the hotel

Breakfast at the hotel Meeting with the guide.

09:00 - 13:00 City tour of St. Petersburg. You will see a unique architectural phenomenon called the Historic Center of St. Petersburg, which was entirely included in the list of World Heritage Sites. This was one of the first cases in UNESCO's practice when the status of monument was granted to a huge landscape, where hundreds of thousands of people live. You will see the monumental St. Isaac's Cathedral, the Admiralty, the Neva River with its granite-clad banks, the Sphinxes brought from Egypt on the University Embankment and aristocratic palaces facing the Neva, the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island with the Rostral Columns, the Winter Palace and the Palace Square, the Summer Garden and the Field of Mars, the Mikhailovsky Castle, the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, picturesque palaces of Nevsky Prospekt, Kazan and Smolny Cathedrals.

13:00 – 14:00 Time for lunch

Optional:

Visit to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood – one of the most picturesque churches in St. Petersburg. The church was erected on the site where Russian Emperor Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881.The cathedral differs from other predominantly Baroque and Neoclassical churches of St.

Petersburg and harks back to medieval Russian architecture. Inside, the temple is a truly museum of mosaics. The church contains over 7500 square meters of mosaics—according to its restorers, more than any other church in the world.

Duration of the tour including transfers: 3 hours OR

Visit to St. Isaac's Cathedral, the largest Orthodox cathedral in St. Petersburg. It took 40 years, from 1818 to 1858, to build the cathedral and upon completion it was given the status of a principal church,

i.e. the main Orthodox church of the capital of the Russian Empire. The height of the cathedral is 101.5 meters and the interior area is more than 4,000 square meters. The cathedral is decorated with 112 giant granite columns. The height of the columns of the lower porticoes is about 17 meters, and the columns of the drum of the central dome reach 14 meters. Each of the giant columns consists of a single

piece of granite. Ten to twelve thousand people worked around the clock for forty years on the construction of St. Isaac's Cathedral.

Duration of the tour including transfers: 3 hours

Transfer to the hotel Free time

Overnight stay at the hotel

Breakfast at the hotel Meeting with the guide.

09:00 – 13:00 Visit to the Peter and Paul Fortress, the original citadel and historical core of the city from which it grew. Between the first half of the 1700s and early 1920s it served as a prison for political criminals and is often nicknamed – the “Russian Bastille”. We will visit the Peter and Paul Cathedral, which has a 122.5 m bell-tower and a gilded angel-topped cupola. The cathedral used to be the main cathedral of the Russian Empire for a long time, where all the tsars and tsaritesses of the Romanov dynasty were buried.

13:00 – 14:00 Time for lunch

Optional:

Visit to the Hermitage Museum. The State Hermitage Museum is a world-known museum of art and culture. Its collections, only a small part of which is on permanent display, comprise over three million items. The exhibition halls feature works of Italian Renaissance artists, including Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, and Leonardo da Vinci; Italian and Spanish fine art including Tintoretto, Velázquez and Murillo; Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque painting, including the large collections of Van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt, and many other paintings and sculptures. The collections occupy a large complex of six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, including the Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors.

Duration of the tour including transfers: 5 hours OR

Visit to the Fabergé Museum in Saint Petersburg. The museum's collection contains more than 4,000 works of decorative applied and fine arts, including gold and silver items, paintings, porcelain and bronze. A highlight of the museum's collection is the group of nine Imperial Easter eggs created by Fabergé for the last two Russian Tsars.

Duration of the tour including transfers: 3 hours OR

Boat Trip on Canals and Rivers is a “must have” excursion in St. Petersburg in the summer. A comfortable boat with panoramic windows will pass under a variety of bridges across rivers and canals of St. Petersburg. Even familiar views look in a different way when viewed from the water. Peter the Great ordered buildings in St. Petersburg to be built facing the rivers. Thanks to this we still can enjoy the most elegant facades of St. Petersburg’s palaces and mansions by a boat trip.

Duration of the tour including transfers: 3 hours

Transfer to the hotel

Free time

Overnight stay at the hotel

Breakfast at the hotel Meeting with the guide.

09:00 – 14:00 Visit to Peterhof - a summer residence of the Russian Tsars. This incredibly beautiful palace and park ensemble is often called "Russian Versailles". We will visit the richly decorated Grand Palace of Peterhof and the unique in its technical solutions Lower Park with fountains, which was arranged on a landscape ideally created by nature for round-the-clock water flow. This made it possible to create about 150 permanently operating large and small fountains on the territory of more than 100 hectares. A distinctive feature of the Peterhof palace and park ensemble is its proximity to the sea.

14:00 – 15:00 Time for lunch Transfer to the hotel or Optional:

Tour of Kronstadt. On the way to the sea fortress of Kronstadt you will drive across the Saint Petersburg Flood Prevention Facility Complex, unofficially the Saint Petersburg Dam, a 25 km long complex of dams for flood control near Saint Petersburg, and learn about St. Petersburg's long history of flooding and flood control. The dam extends from the city of Lomonosov northward to Kotlin Island (on which the city of Kronstadt is located). Founded in the early 18th century by Peter the Great, Kronstadt had the strategic significance as a primary maritime defense outpost of the former Russian capital. The main base of the Russian Baltic Fleet was located in Kronstadt, guarding the approaches to Saint Petersburg by means of many military fortifications. You will make a stop at the Fort "Grand Duke Constantine".

Then during the sightseeing tour around Kronstadt you will see the Kronstadt Footstick - a level gauge for measuring the height of the Baltic Sea level. From the zero mark of the Kronstadt Footstick absolute height measurements are made on the whole territory of the former Soviet Union. You will see the Petrovsky dry dock, a unique hydraulic engineering structure of the XVIII century, and visit the Naval cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Kronstadt (no excursion inside), a Russian Orthodox cathedral built in 1903–1913 as the main church of the Russian Navy and dedicated to all fallen seamen. The Cathedral of St. Sophia in Constantinople served as the prototype of this grandiose cathedral.

Duration of the tour including transfers: 6 hours

Breakfast at the hotel Free day

Optional:

Visit to the famous imperial residence Tsarskoe Selo, created by architect Rastrelli in the Russian Baroque style, which is characterized by majestic ensembles and huge size of buildings, powerful proportions, abundance of color and gilding. We will visit the Catherine Palace, created by Peter the Great for his wife, but it received its present form during the reign of Catherine the Great. Fascinated by antique art, the Empress wished to decorate her apartments in accordance with fashionable tastes and entrusted their decoration to the Scottish architect Charles Cameron, a connoisseur of antique

architecture. The interiors he created were characterized by exquisite beauty. The most famous is the

Amber Room, the jewel of the Catherine Palace, justifiably called one of the wonders of the world. Duration of the tour including transfers: 5 hours

OR

Excursion to the historic Konstantinovsky Palace, a monument of architecture of the XVIII century, named since 2003 the State Complex "Palace of Congresses". The complex is subordinate to the Department of Affairs of the President of the Russian Federation. The palace has preserved the atmosphere of luxury of tsarist times and multiplied it with the rigor of the Palace of Congresses, where nowadays events at the highest interstate level are held. In July 2006, the Palace of Congresses hosted the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, and in September 2013 it hosted the G-20 summit. Among the halls visited on a guided tour there are: Marble Hall, Blue Hall, Belvedere, Presidential Drawing Rooms and many others.

Duration of the tour including transfers: 5 hours OR

A fascinating nature tour with a visit to the famous Sablinsky Caves and the Big Tosnensky Waterfall.

Tosnensky waterfall is one of the most impressive and interesting natural sights in the vicinity of St. Petersburg. It is all the more unique because it is not often you will find waterfalls on the flat terrain. The name of this place comes from the French «sable», which means "sand". There is indeed a lot of sand there, sand from the seabed: millions of years ago the ocean raged there. The waterfall was formed about 11,000 years ago and is constantly in motion. Every year it moves upstream. During its existence, it has traveled a distance of 7.5 kilometers.

Waterfalls in the Sablinsky Reserve are flat, that is, in height they do not exceed two to four meters. The age of the Tosnensky waterfall is impressive, because it is the same age as the famous Niagara Falls in North America: their age is 10,000 years.

In our tour you will visit the famous Sablinskiye caves - a unique natural monument. You will be able to walk through the real cave halls, see representatives of local nature and feel like a real explorer during the tour of the main cave.

Rules and recommendations for visitors:

- It is not recommended to visit the cave for preschool children and people over 60 years old, pregnant women, as well as those suffering from cardiovascular diseases, claustrophobia, hypertension and other diseases, the aggravation of which may be caused by a sharp change in atmospheric pressure or air temperature. The temperature is +8 °C all year round. It does not change, even if there is heat or frost on the surface.

- It is necessary to have a jacket, a hat, trekking shoes and a flashlight

- Smoking is prohibited, as well as taking photos of bats and another cave wildlife Duration of the tour including transfers: 6,5 hours.

A lunch can be offered after the visit to the caves and the waterfall for an additional surcharge.

Breakfast at the hotel

Check-out and transfer to airport

Program is subject to change due to organizational reasons without reducing the scope of services provided!

The starting times specified in the program are advisory and may change depending on the transport situation and the entrance time confirmed by the museum!

Some optional tours have to be booked long beforehand. Please check the deadlines with your tour provider!

Net Package Rate per person in EUR

Optional excursions per person in EUR