St. Petersburg for kids

St. Petersburg is not the most family-friendly travel destination, but there’s plenty here to do with young children if you know where to look. This six-hour tour, designed for children between the ages of 10 and 16, focuses on perennially popular St. Petersburg attractions and is lead by an experienced tour guide with a great rapport with younger visitors.

The tour begins at the Grand Maket Rossiya, a recently opened but already much-loved attraction for children of all ages. This huge working model covers over 800 square meters and shows the most famous natural and man-made landmarks from all over Russia, from Kaliningrad in the west to Chukotka in the east. The interactive displays include railways, factories, farm machinery and military vehicles, which visitors can set in motion using buttons. The model also works in 15-minute cycles of day and night, so visitors can watch as the sky darkens and the model switches to "artificial" illumination. The second-largest model of this type in the world, it will easily keep kids entertained for the allotted 90 minutes, while also providing a great platform for the guide to impart an overview of the history and geography of Russia.

From there, the tour moves by bus to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where children will be shown the fascinating displays of the fortress’s prison. Here the interiors of cells where political prisoners including Maxim Gorky and Leon Trotsky were incarcerated have been recreated in all their simple and chilling detail, while multimedia displays bring to life the history of the prison and political repression in the late Tsarist era.

The group next moves the short distance from the fortress to the Museum of Artillery which, with its massive collection of Russian military hardware from the 19th and 20th centuries and antique weaponry from throughout the world, has long been one of St. Petersburg’s favourite attractions among children. Highlights of the exhibition include the outdoor displays of historic cannon and 20th century anti-aircraft guns and rocket systems.

The final stop of the tour, again reached by bus, is the Russian Levsha museum of microminiature art, which celebrates various aspects of Russian culture and craft in miniature, with extraordinarily intricate displays that can only be viewed through magnifying glasses and microscopes. Among the most popular displays are the caravan of camels in the eye of a needle, the shoed flee (from a Russian folktale), a full chess set less than half the size of a match-head, and inscriptions engraved on grains of rice and a single human hair.

Itinerary

Itinerary and route details