Europe 2019: Peterhof Palace

Europe 2019

Peterhof Palace

Saint Petersburg, Russia

One of the first things we did in Saint Petersburg was visit Peterhof. It might deserve a spot on our "100 Places" wall, but since the Hermitage is already on there we figured we had St Pete covered. 

As covered in a previous post, we took a hydrofoil to Peterhof. It's pretty quick and they have massive docks set up to receive them. Our September visit wasn't mired by crowds, but you can tell they're ready for a lot more people when the weather is warmer.

It's called Peterhof Palace, but we made the choice just to visit the gardens and fountains and not tour the inside of the palace. It would have made it an entire day and there are a lot of things we wanted to see in the city during our visit.

There are 64 fountains, and one of the coolest things about the entire place is that there are no pumps. All of the fountains are fed from natural springs that collect in reservoirs in the upper gardens and then gravity fed to create pressure. 

We just walked the gardens, which were lovely, and Anya gave us all kinds of interesting information. 

Perhaps my favorite part of the stroll were the "trick" fountains they have located in certain places. If you look to my left in the picture here you'll see a bunch of stones on the ground. It looks just like a cobblestone walkway, and it is. However, if you walk across it and step on the wrong stones water will shoot across and drench you. I made a dash and missed the trigger stones, but we watched other tourists try it with varying results. Hilarious!

This was another excellent stop for Samantha. The fountains were fun but the whole place was just a giant park to her that she could run around and play in.

It's hard to believe, but most of Peterhof was destroyed by the Germans during WWII. (It's not hard to believe that they did it - you run into things all over Europe that have been rebuilt since WWII. It's hard to believe it was destroyed at all because it doesn't look like it's been rebuilt or restored.) They occupied the palace and blew it up when they were leaving.

You can't visit Saint Petersburg without seeing Peterhof - I mean, it's not a law or anything, you just shouldn't. It's not Versailles, even though it was meant to be, but it's beautiful and interesting and not to be missed.