Best Things to Do in Yekaterinburg: Landmarks, Museums & Views

From the eighteenth-century ironworks dam that gave birth to the city to avant-garde Soviet housing complexes and high-rise observation decks, Yekaterinburg packs three centuries of Ural history into its walkable centre. Below are the essential experiences to include on a visit, ordered so you can link them along the Iset River and Lenin Avenue.

Plotinka and Historic Square

Start where Yekaterinburg was founded in 1723: the 209-metre larch-and-granite dam known as Plotinka. On its southern side, 8-hectare Historic Square preserves red-brick and stone workshops housing the Museum of Architecture and Design and the Museum of Fine Arts, alongside an outdoor display of massive Ural boulders of rhodonite, jasper, and quartz and the hexagonal late-1890s Water Tower.

The Church on the Blood and Kharitonov Estate

Climb Voznesenskaya Hill to the five-domed Russian-Byzantine Church on the Blood, erected between 2000 and 2003 on the plot of the former Ipatiev House where Emperor Nicholas II and his family lost their lives on the night of 16 to 17 July 1918. Two blocks higher on Karl Liebknecht Street stands the white-columned neoclassical Rastorguyev-Kharitonov Palace (1794 to 1824) and its 9-hectare English-style park with an artificial lake and white island rotunda.

The Literary Quarter and Opera Theatre

Between the City Pond and Voznesenskaya Hill, the quiet cobbles of the Literary Quarter connect nineteenth-century wooden estates dedicated to Ural writers Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, Pavel Bazhov, and Fyodor Reshetnikov. A short walk east along Lenin Avenue brings you to the 1912 Yekaterinburg State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, designed for 1,200 spectators, while downstream along the Iset River rises the 1980 Yekaterinburg Circus beneath a 50-metre open-work concrete-and-steel dome designed by engineers under Julijs Slavinskas and architects Julian Shvartsbreim and M. Korobkov.

The Yeltsin Center and Vysotsky Viewing Deck

Spend an afternoon inside the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center (opened on 25 November 2015 and named European Museum of the Year in 2017), where nine interactive halls trace twentieth-century Russian history. Before sunset, take the lift up the 54-storey Vysotsky skyscraper to its 52nd-floor open-air observation deck at 186 metres.

Constructivism and Ural Day Trips

Follow a self-guided architectural trail through 1930s Constructivist landmarks from the semicircular Hotel Iset at Gorodok Chekistov to the 1929 to 1931 reinforced-concrete White Tower in Uralmash, then reserve half a day for the wooden churches of Ganina Yama and the Europe-Asia border or the 57.5-metre Leaning Tower of Nevyansk.