Shartash Stone Tents & Nevyansk Leaning Tower: Day Trips from Yekaterinburg

Beyond the museums around Plotinka, Yekaterinburg makes an effortless base for exploring both ancient Ural granite formations and the eighteenth-century iron-smelting empire of the Demidov dynasty. You can visit the Shartash Stone Tents and Lake Shartash inside the eastern city limits by tram or bus, or take a suburban train 97 kilometres north to the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk.

Shartash Stone Tents and Lake Shartash (Kirovsky District)

Tucked into a pine forest park at the end of Vladimir Vysotsky Street in the eastern Kirovsky District, the Shartash Stone Tents (Shartashskiye Kamennye Palatki) are a series of weathered granite tors formed roughly 300 million years ago during the Paleozoic era. Wind, frost, and water erosion split the granite massif along horizontal and vertical joints into stacked, mattress-shaped slabs that resemble giant stone tents or step pyramids.

Covering 2 hectares at an elevation of 299 metres above sea level (rising 24 metres above the surface of nearby Lake Shartash), the granite ridge stretches 80 to 100 metres in length with individual rock stacks reaching 12 to 18 metres high. Archaeological excavations around the ridge and the shores of Lake Shartash have uncovered ten prehistoric settlements and sacrificial sites from the Neolithic, Eneolithic, and Bronze Ages (3rd to 2nd millennia BC), and in 1905 to 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary Yakov Sverdlov held clandestine workers' assemblies on the flat granite amphitheatre constructed on the northern face. Protected since 1960 as a natural and historical monument, the rocks sit a short woodland walk through the pines from the 7-square-kilometre basin of Lake Shartash.

Day Trip to the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk (97 Kilometres North)

For a full-day excursion into the heart of the Old Urals, ride a Lastochka or suburban train from Yekaterinburg-Passazhirsky Station 97 kilometres north to Nevyansk, founded in 1700 on the Neyva River when Peter the Great granted the state ironworks to Tula gunsmith Nikita Demidov in 1702.

Beside the Nevyansk Pond rises the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk, built between 1721 and 1732 during the eighteenth century on the orders of Nikita's son Akinfiy Demidov. Rising 57.5 metres from a 9.5-by-9.5-metre square base into three octagonal tiers, the white-washed brick tower leans 1.85 metres (approximately 3 degrees) to the southwest because its builders corrected a foundation tilt mid-construction, giving it a slight sabre curve. Guided tours climb through Akinfiy Demidov's former office and laboratory, the Acoustic ("Whispering") Room between the fourth and fifth floors (where words whispered in one corner are heard clearly diagonally across the vaulted ceiling), and the seventh-floor clockwork chamber housing a 1730 musical carillon clock made in England by master clockmaker Richard Phelps, all topped by a cast-iron roof grounding rod installed twenty-five years before Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod.