Kok-Tobe Hill Cable Car, Hotel Kazakhstan, Palace of the Republic & Republic Square

As Dostyk Avenue climbs south from the Golden Square toward the mountain valleys, nineteenth-century timber cottages give way to the monumental civic plazas and panoramic hilltop viewpoints erected between the 1970s and the post-independence era.

Palace of the Republic, Abai Monument, and Hotel Kazakhstan

At the junction of Dostyk and Abai avenues stands the bronze monument to Abai Kunanbayuly, the nineteenth-century poet, philosopher, and composer who shaped modern literary Kazakh. Behind the statue stretches the sweeping cantilevered roof of the Palace of the Republic (1970), a state-prize-winning Soviet modernist concert hall framed by cascading fountains. Across Dostyk Avenue rises the 26-storey Hotel Kazakhstan (1977), whose curved seismic shear-wall core topped by a scalloped golden crown made it the tallest skyscraper in Almaty for three decades and earned it a permanent place on the national 5,000-tenge banknote.

Riding the cable car up Kok-Tobe Hill

Immediately east of the Palace of the Republic, the lower terminal of the Kok-Tobe gondola lifts passengers 1.62 kilometres across the fruit gardens of the Gorny Gigant neighbourhood to the summit of Kok-Tobe ("Green Hill") at 1,100 metres above sea level. First opened in 1967 and rebuilt with modern French-engineered cabins in 2016, the six-minute ride opens onto wooden viewing boardwalks looking straight down Dostyk Avenue on one side and up toward the 4,000-metre glaciers of the Zailiyskiy Alatau on the other. Just beyond the park perimeter rises the 371.5-metre Almaty Television Tower (completed in 1983); standing on a 1,000-metre foothill, its octagonal steel mast is one of the highest-elevation free-standing tubular television towers in the world. Along the summit promenade you will also pass a small hillside orchard of Sievers apple trees and a bronze bench sculpture of The Beatles installed in 2007.

Republic Square and the Independence Monument

Walking twenty minutes west along Satpayev Street brings you to Republic Square (Respublika Alany), laid out in 1980 below the terraced white marble pavilions of the former Central Committee building (now the city Akimat). In 1986, this plaza was the epicentre of the December Zheltoksan student demonstrations, commemorated nearby by the Dawn of Freedom monument. At the centre of the square rises the 28-metre Independence Monument (1996), designed by a team led by Shota Valikhanov: a tall Kazakhstani stele crowned by a six-metre golden warrior standing on the back of a winged snow leopard (barys), flanked at its base by bronze reliefs depicting ten chapters of steppe history from Queen Tomyris to modern sovereignty. Pair your visit with the original archaeological exhibits inside the Central State Museum next door or take Bus 12 up to Medeu.