Things to Do in Saint Petersburg: Top Palaces, Cathedrals and Canals

For more than two centuries as the seat of the Romanov dynasty, Saint Petersburg accumulated a concentration of imperial palaces, neoclassical squares, and engineering monuments unmatched elsewhere in northern Europe. Organising sightseeing by riverfront and canal corridors allows travellers to experience the city's grand ensembles without backtracking across the wide Neva delta.

Walk Palace Square and the State Hermitage

Begin on Palace Square, the ceremonial heart of imperial Russia framed on the north by Bartolomeo Rastrelli's 1762 Winter Palace and on the south by Carlo Rossi's sweeping yellow-and-white General Staff Building (1819 to 1829). At the centre stands Auguste de Montferrand's 47.5-metre Alexander Column, carved from a single 600-tonne monolith of red Finnish granite and raised in 1832 without mortar. Inside the State Hermitage Museum, visitors tour the white-and-gold Jordan Staircase, the malachite-columned state rooms, and galleries holding works by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Matisse, and Picasso.

Compare Three Monumental Churches

Three remarkably different cathedrals stand within easy walking distance of one another in the historic centre south of the Bolshaya Neva:

1. Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood: Built between 1883 and 1907 beside the Griboyedov Canal where Emperor Alexander II was fatally wounded in March 1881, its interior walls and vaults are lined with more than 7,000 square metres of glass and stone mosaics.
2. Kazan Cathedral: Completed in 1811 on Nevsky Prospekt by Andrey Voronikhin, its semicircular colonnade of 96 Corinthian columns faces the avenue and shelters the tomb of Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov.
3. Saint Isaac's Cathedral: Designed by Auguste de Montferrand and built between 1818 and 1858, its 101.5-metre gilded dome offers a panoramic outdoor walkway above its monolithic red granite columns; see the cathedrals guide for entry details.

Stand Before the Bronze Horseman on Senate Square

Between the western facade of the Admiralty Building and Saint Isaac's Cathedral, Senate Square opens directly onto the Neva River embankment. Here stands the Bronze Horseman, the equestrian statue of Peter the Great sculpted by Étienne Maurice Falconet at the command of Empress Catherine the Great and unveiled in August 1782. The rearing bronze horse crushes a serpent of treason atop the Thunder Stone, an enormous granite boulder hauled overland and by barge from the Gulf of Finland coast at Lakhta.

Cross to Hare Island and the Strelka

Walk across Trinity Bridge and the Ioannovsky Bridge to Hare Island to inspect the bastion walls of the 1703 Peter and Paul Fortress and the 122.5-metre gilded spire of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, where Russian sovereigns from Peter the Great to Nicholas II are buried. From the southern ramparts, continue west to the Strelka on Vasilyevsky Island, where two 32-metre red Rostral Columns flank Jean-François Thomas de Thomon's 1810 Old Stock Exchange.

Cruise the Moika and Fontanka Canals and Visit the Imperial Suburbs

Board a low-profile canal boat along the Moika or Fontanka rivers to pass beneath low cast-iron bridges, past the yellow facade of the Fabergé Museum at Shuvalov Palace, Saint Michael's Castle, and the red-brick naval arch of New Holland Island before emerging onto the broad waters of the Bolshaya Neva. On subsequent days, ride a hydrofoil across the Gulf of Finland to the 64 gravity-fed fountains of the Grand Cascade at Peterhof, and take a suburban train south from Vitebsky Railway Terminal to the reconstructed Amber Room inside the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk Palace.