Kronstadt Sestroretsk Zelenogorsk

Kotlin Island lies in the middle of the Gulf of Finland, about 30 kilometres west of Saint Petersburg. It is home to the fortified city of Kronstadt, which Tsar Peter I had built in 1703, the same year as the city of Saint Petersburg. For this reason, the fortifications face exclusively west, south and north. Kronstadt’s old town, with its many small forts, has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990. In 2011, the so-called Saint Petersburg Dam was completed. Using Kotlin Island, this structure separates the entire eastern part of the Gulf of Finland from the Baltic Sea. Several water passageways and shipping locks are part of the project. To the north, the dam reaches the city of Sestroretsk. The dam forms part of a ring motorway around Saint Petersburg.

The city, with a population of about 37,000, lies northwest of Saint Petersburg, directly on the Gulf of Finland, at the mouth of the Sestra River, where it flows into the Baltic Sea. It traces its origins to a Swedish settlement founded in the 17th century. The present-day city was founded by Peter I in 1714. In the years that followed, it became home not only to a summer residence of the tsar, but also, from the 1920s onwards, to numerous sanatoriums and dacha settlements. Its best-known attraction is Dubki Landscape Park. Sestroretsk lies on the railway line from Saint Petersburg to Vyborg–Helsinki and is the northern terminus of the Saint Petersburg Dam.

Zelenogorsk (literally, “Green City”) lies about 50 kilometres northwest of Saint Petersburg, directly north of Kotlin Island on the Gulf of Finland. The city of Zelenogorsk (Finnish: Terijoki) originated as a Finnish fishing village from the period when Finland was part of Sweden. This area was long contested between Sweden/Finland and Russia. Zelenogorsk has been part of Russia definitively since 1944.

The northern part of the Saint Petersburg metropolitan area, including Kotlin Island, the cities of Sestroretsk and Zelenogorsk, and the Saint Petersburg Dam, forms a transition from Scandinavia’s rocky coastline to the Baltic region’s flat coastal plains and makes for an appealing holiday destination on the eastern Baltic Sea.