Day Trips from Saint Petersburg

Russia's version of Versailles. But with one feature the French never managed: hundreds of gilded fountains that run May, October using only gravity-fed water from the Ropsha Hills, no pumps. The Grand Cascade in front of the palace is pure theatre. Below it, the lower park stretches for kilometres along the Gulf of Finland shore. The upper gardens are calmer. It's busy, and rightly so.

Pushkin (still called Tsarskoye Selo by most locals) is home to the Catherine Palace and its headline act, the reconstructed Amber Room, an entire chamber lined with amber panels looted by the Nazis in 1941 and recreated over 25 years. The adjoining Catherine Park is one of Russia's finer formal gardens, with lakes, bridges, and a Turkish Bath pavilion that looks both absurd and charming.

Novgorod is the trip that keeps exceeding expectations. Founded in the 9th century, it was Russia's first major city and the centre of an independent republic trading with the Hanseatic League. Its Kremlin is older than Moscow's, and the bare-brick Cathedral of Saint Sophia inside feels quietly powerful. Across the river, Yaroslav's Court packs a dozen ancient churches into a small area you can explore at will.

Vyborg has been passed between Sweden, Russia, and Finland so often that its character feels agreeably mixed: 1920s Scandinavian stone houses sit beside Soviet apartment blocks, and a medieval Swedish castle rises from an island in the harbour. The old quarter is small enough to cross on foot. Its market square still shows its Finnish roots. Three kilometres out, Monrepos Park is a Romantic garden of wooded islets and mock-Gothic ruins that can catch you off guard with its mood.

While Catherine Palace shouts, Pavlovsk whispers. Paul I's neoclassical mansion is almost modest for an emperor. But the 600-hectare English park that wraps around it is one of Russia's best Romantic gardens. Come in late September and the maples quietly set the whole place on fire. The paths keep tempting you on until you realise the afternoon has slipped away.

Kotlin Island still belongs to the navy. Cannons, anchor monuments and sailors in uniform remind you that Kronstadt was the Gulf of Finland's locked gate for three hundred years. The Naval Cathedral of St Nicholas, once a Soviet cinema, gleams again after restoration. The harbour walls, canals and lack of souvenir stalls make the town feel lived-in, not packaged.

Where the Neva leaves Ladoga, a fist-shaped island guards the river mouth. Prince Yuri founded a fortress here in 1323; Swedes stormed it, the Red Army held it through the 900-day siege, and Peter the Great jailed his first wife inside. Locals still call the place Oreshek ('little nut'); the walls are left half-ruined on purpose, so the stone tells the story without museum polish.

Gatchina is the quiet sibling. Paul I's palace is the biggest of the imperial residences by floor space. Yet from the outside it looks like a brooding stone manor, which suited his suspicious nature. The park was laid out as an 18th-century English landscape, complete with a walkable underground grotto and a lakeside Priory Palace built from rammed earth that seems to float above the water.