Peterhof Grand Palace

The Grand Palace at Peterhof is the long golden-and-cream façade that crowns the terrace above the Grand Cascade, looking down the Sea Channel towards the Gulf of Finland. Peter the Great founded the estate as his own answer to Versailles, and the first palace here, designed with the French architect Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, was known simply as the Upper Palace and was not much larger than the other buildings in the park. Its present scale is the work of Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who between 1745 and 1755, for Empress Elizabeth, raised and extended it with wings and gilded domed pavilions until the façade stretched for some 268 metres.

Inside, the sequence of rooms runs from Petrine restraint to Rastrelli's gilt and Catherine the Great's taste. The Chesme Hall is hung with twelve large canvases of the Russian naval victory over the Ottoman fleet at Chesma, painted in 1771–1773; the Chinese cabinets of the 1760s are lined with lacquer panels and painted landscapes; and one room, the Cabinet of Fashions and Graces, has its walls covered with 368 portraits of young women by Pietro Rotari, bought from the painter's widow in 1764 and fitted edge to edge like a tapestry of faces.

Outside, the palace is the backdrop for one of the great feats of garden engineering: the fountains work without pumps, fed by gravity from springs and reservoirs in the higher ground, and the gilded Samson in the basin below throws a jet some 20 metres high. The palace was largely destroyed during the German occupation of 1941–1944, and its restoration, begun almost as soon as the war ended, has continued for decades. Peterhof is part of the UNESCO World Heritage property of the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and related monuments.

Getting there

The palace stands in the town of Peterhof, on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland west of St Petersburg; Pulkovo Airport (LED) is about 22 km away. In the warm months hydrofoils run from the pier by the Hermitage and land at the Peterhof pier at the head of the Sea Channel, about 200 m from the Grand Cascade. Suburban trains from the Baltiysky station in St Petersburg reach Novy Peterhof in around 45 minutes, from where it is roughly a 20-minute walk or a short bus ride to the Upper Garden.