Tsarskoye Selo (Catherine Palace), St Petersburg, Russia

Travel advisory: Both the US and UK governments maintain “Do Not Travel” advisories for Russia as of June 2026, citing the ongoing war in Ukraine, risk of arbitrary detention of foreign nationals, drone attacks on cities including St. Petersburg, and monitoring of all electronic communications. The information below covers Tsarskoye Selo and Catherine Palace for reference and future planning. Check your government’s current advice before making any travel decision.

The Place

Tsarskoye Selo (meaning “Tsar’s Village”) sits 24 kilometres south of central St. Petersburg in the town now administratively called Pushkin. For about two centuries, this was the summer seat of the Russian imperial family, and it shows. The ensemble of palaces, formal gardens, and parkland is managed by the Tsarskoe Selo State Museum and Heritage Site, one of the most significant palace complexes in Europe.

The dominant structure is the Catherine Palace, named after Catherine I (wife of Peter the Great) for whom it was originally built in the early 18th century. The building was substantially expanded and remodelled for Empress Elizabeth in the 1750s by Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who gave it its current Baroque exterior: a 325-metre blue and white facade trimmed with gilded ornament. Catherine the Great later remodelled the interior rooms in a more restrained Neoclassical style, which survives in several of the apartments.

The Amber Room

The Amber Room is what draws most visitors. The original was a chamber lined with amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors, originally designed in Germany in the early 1700s and given to Peter the Great by the Prussian King Frederick William I in 1716. Installed in the Catherine Palace, expanded over subsequent decades, it eventually covered more than 55 square metres and contained over six tonnes of amber.

In 1941, German soldiers of Army Group North disassembled and crated the entire room in 36 hours and shipped it to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). It was displayed there briefly, then packed away in the castle basement as Allied bombing intensified. Documentation ends in April 1945. The most thorough investigation of its fate, conducted by British journalists in 2004, concluded it was most likely destroyed when the castle burned during the final Soviet assault on Königsberg in April 1945. The mystery of whether the original survived and was hidden persists in popular culture, but the official assessment is that it was destroyed.

The reconstruction took from 1979 to 2003, required 40 Russian and German craftsmen working over two decades, consumed six tonnes of amber, and was opened by Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2003. What visitors see today is a full-scale replica built with access to historical photographs, archival documents, and surviving amber fragments. Photography is prohibited inside the Amber Room, which is enforced.

Visiting in Practice

Tickets for the Catherine Palace cost 2,200 roubles for foreign visitors in 2026, with the Amber Room included. Children under 7 enter free; ages 7 to 13 pay 700 roubles. Advance booking online is available up to seven days ahead, and tickets are nominal (issued with your name and passport number). Peak season queues without advance tickets can run to several hours.

All visitors follow a guided tour inside the palace, in Russian unless a separate arrangement has been made in advance. Audio guides in multiple languages are available at the ticket office.

Several rooms were closed for restoration as of mid-2026, including the Lyon Hall, Arabesque Hall, and Catherine’s private apartments, as well as the Cameron Gallery. Check the official Tsarskoe Selo website (tzar.ru) for current room availability before visiting.

The Alexander Palace

Within the same park, about a ten-minute walk from the Catherine Palace, stands the Alexander Palace, built in the 1790s for the future Tsar Alexander I by the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi. It was the final home of Nicholas II and the Romanov family before their arrest and eventual execution in 1918. The palace has undergone significant restoration in recent years and reopened with permanent exhibitions dedicated to Nicholas II’s family and the last years of the imperial period. The scale and tone here is more intimate than the Catherine Palace and the historical resonance is, for many visitors, more affecting.

The Parks

Catherine Park surrounds the palace and is included in the entrance ticket during high season. The park covers 107 hectares and includes the Great Pond, formal gardens near the palace, and a more naturalistic English-style landscape further out. Structures scattered through the park include the Hermitage Pavilion (a retreat built for Catherine the Great, now viewable from the exterior), a pyramid built as a monument to Catherine’s pet dogs, and a Turkish Bath pavilion reflecting the fashion for orientalism in 18th-century garden design.

Alexander Park adjoins the Catherine Park and is larger, more wooded, and considerably less visited. It is worth entering if you want to walk without crowds.

Getting There from St. Petersburg

The most straightforward route from central St. Petersburg is the suburban train (elektrichka) from Vitebsk Station to Tsarskoye Selo (Detskoe Selo) station, taking about 25 to 30 minutes and running frequently during the day. From the station, the palace is a 15-minute walk through the town or a short taxi ride. Guided tours from St. Petersburg by minibus or coach are also widely available and include the trip to Peterhof, which some visitors prefer as a combined day.

The Town

The town of Pushkin beyond the palace grounds is named for Alexander Pushkin, who attended the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum from 1811 to 1817. The Lyceum building is preserved and open as a museum adjacent to the Catherine Palace. Pushkin’s experience there, with its emphasis on literature and free thinking relative to the rigid structure of other Russian educational institutions of the period, is credited by literary historians as formative to his development as a writer.

When to Go

June and July bring the largest visitor numbers and the longest queues. Late September and October see the park turn to autumn colour with far fewer visitors, though some subsidiary attractions close for the season. Winter visits are possible and atmospheric in snow, but operating hours are shorter and some outdoor areas are not accessible.