Peterhof: the Fountain Parks and the Palace

About the tour

Peter I conceived Peterhof in 1715 as a residence that was to surpass Versailles. What emerged was something more: 147 working fountains, 102 hectares of Lower Park, and a forty-kilometre water conduit that still runs without a single pump — on the fall of the land alone. Peterhof has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1990. We travel there by car, with a guide who stays with you all day. The return to the city takes about an hour.

The road to Peterhof

The hour along the Peterhof road is already part of the tour. Country estates of the St Petersburg nobility once lined this route; you will hear their stories and see the Konstantinovsky Palace at Strelna.

The Grand Palace, or one of the small ones

The facade of the Grand Palace runs 268 metres: it was built under Peter, and under Elizabeth, Rastrelli rebuilt it in exuberant baroque. The small palaces are another matter entirely. Monplaisir, Peter’s favourite, stands right at the water’s edge and holds the first collection of European painting in Russia. Marly is named after Louis XIV’s residence and has just twelve rooms. Here the tsars lived without ceremony — and the objects of their ordinary daily life survive to this day.

A walk through the Lower Park

Unhurried, in your guide’s company, along two and a half kilometres of park on the shore of the Gulf of Finland:

• The Grand Cascade — marble terraces, balustrades, more than two hundred gilded bronze figures, and dozens of jets washing over all of it at once.

• Samson — a monument to the victory at Poltava: the battle fell on St Sampson’s day, so the lion in the hero’s hands is Sweden. The jet reaches twenty metres.

• The Chessboard Hill cascade — a sheet of water over black and white steps, with painted winged dragons at the mouth of the grotto.

• The Roman fountains — paired, two-tiered and faced in marble: inspired by the fountains of the Vatican, but not a copy.

• The trick fountains — the oldest, the Little Sofas, have worked since 1723. The jets go off unexpectedly, exactly as Peter intended. Children are delighted; adults get wet.

• The Pyramid fountain — 505 jets and around a hundred litres of water a second, in seven tiers of foam.

• The Lion Cascade — a classical colonnade with waterfall steps, the only one set on a terrace rather than a slope.

• The Favourite fountain — a little dog chases ducks in a circle; the barking and quacking came from copper tubes with reeds, and the movement from a water wheel.

• The Golden Hill cascade — the vertical faces of the steps are sheathed in gilded copper sheet: the water positively blazes.

What else your guide will tell you

• Why the engineer Münnich chose this particular site, and how the water reaches it by gravity from the Ropsha heights.

• In the autumn of 1941 Peterhof was occupied, the cascades were destroyed by artillery, and Samson vanished without trace. Restoration began in 1944, and by 1947 the fountain was running again.

• What was evacuated before the Germans arrived — more than eight thousand decorative objects — and what had to be made anew.

Please note: the fountains run from late April to mid-October. Which cascades are included may vary depending on which palace you visit and how long the tour inside it lasts.