Amber Museum, Dohna Tower and Upper Pond: Baltic Gold and Fortress Walls

Because the Sambian Peninsula in Kaliningrad Oblast holds around 90 percent of the world's explored Baltic amber reserves, no visit to the city is complete without touring the Kaliningrad Regional Amber Museum on Marshal Vasilevsky Square. Opened in 1979, the museum occupies the circular red-brick casemates of Dohna Tower where the fortifications meet the southern shore of Upper Pond.

Dohna Tower (1853) and the Amber Collection

Designed by engineers Julius Engelbrecht and von Heil under fortification chief Ernst Ludwig von Aster and named after Prussian Field Marshal Karl Friedrich Emil zu Dohna-Schlobitten, Dohna Tower was completed in 1853 as a circular brick artillery bastion measuring 34 metres in diameter and 12 metres in height, with outer walls up to 2 metres thick. During the Battle of Königsberg, its garrison held out among the last German strongpoints in April 1945.

Spread across the halls of the tower, the Amber Museum displays thousands of pieces: raw Baltic succinite ranging from transparent golden droplets to a 4.28-kilogram (4 kg 280 g) nugget, more than 3,000 prehistoric inclusions trapping Eocene insects and plant fragments, reconstructed seventeenth-century Amber Room panels, and Soviet-era jewellery crafted at the Yantarny Amber Combine. Check the official museum site for seasonal hours.

Rossgarten Gate and Upper Pond (Oberteich)

Immediately adjoining Dohna Tower stands Rossgarten Gate, built between 1852 and 1855 to a design by Friedrich August Stüler with seven arched casemates and portrait medallions of Prussian generals Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August Neidhardt von Gneisenau sculpted by Wilhelm Ludwig Stürmer.

Behind the tower stretches Upper Pond (Verkhny Prud, historically Oberteich), a 41.1-hectare reservoir dammed in 1270 by the Teutonic Knights at an elevation 22 metres above the Pregolya River. Walking paths follow its shores past Hermann Thiele's four 1913 artificial-stone sculptures of a sea lion, seal, walrus, and sea elephant on the western bank toward the early twentieth-century villas of Maraunenhof and the nearby Wrangel Tower.