Nearest metro: Sadovaya, Sennaya Ploshchad
The Columb Hotel is located in the very center of St. Petersburg, in the heart of the area described by Feodor Dostoevsky in his greatest novels. Only 15 minutes' walk from Nevsky Prospekt and the Hermitage Museum, the Columb is also very convenient for the world-famous Mariinsky Theater, which is only a couple of blocks from the hotel.The nearest metro stations, Sennaya Ploshchad and Sadovaya, are around 10 minutes' walk away, providing fast access to almost every corner of the city. St. Petersburg's mainline railway stations are all within 30 minutes' drive of the hotel, and the Columb can be reached by car from Pulkovo International Airport in less than 40 minutes. There is also a minibus service running direct from the airport to Sennaya Ploshchad.
Local Sightseeing
Practically on the corner of Voznesenskiy Prospekt and Kazanskaya Ulitsa, the Columb Hotel is only a couple of hundred meters from St. Isaac's Cathedral, St. Petersburg's largest and most spectacular church. The life's work of French architect Auguste de Montferrand, completed in 1858, St. Isaac's took 40 years to build and decorate. It is particularly worth visiting not just for its remarkably rich marble-clad interiors, but also for the superb views of the historic centre from its colonnade.A short walk east of the Columb Hotel brings you to Sennaya Ploshchad. This large, teeming square was once the city haymarket and, in Dostoevsky's time, a center of squalor, poverty, and vice. Although it's now cleaned up more or less, it does still have one of the city's best markets, selling excellent fruit and vegetables, meat and fresh fish. Behind Sennoy Market, Apraksin Dvor, a sprawling street market for clothes and household goods, has yet to be redeveloped, and still retains some of the area's past squalid exoticism.
Just south of Sennaya Ploshchad, the Yusupov Gardens, in front of the first St. Petersburg palace of the prominent Yusupov Family, are a pleasant park for a summer stroll or picnic, although the palace itself has long be used as an engineering institute and is closed to the public.
