Rooftop tours offer fresh views of St Petersburg, and this time they’re legal
For years adventurous visitors to Russian city have made clandestine rooftop tours for views of its romantic skyline; now you can do it legally and in safety
Standing on a roof in central St Petersburg, Marta Granadeiro gasps as she watches the statues on the Hermitage Museum’s facade gleam in the sunset.
“We wanted to see something extraordinary in St Petersburg and now we have,” says Granadeiro, a 23-year-old Spanish tourist who has climbed onto the roof of a flat building on a tour organised by a local tourism agency.
The rusty rooftops of Russia’s tsarist-era capital, with its romantic skyline of elegant onion domes and pre-revolutionary buildings, have long been a coveted destination for illegal excursions.
To convince officials to let tourists admire the city from above, the agency PanoramicRoof spent four years navigating bureaucratic hoops to get the necessary permits.
“I had this idea after getting my wedding photos taken on St Petersburg’s roofs,” says Anastasiya Krasitskaya, the agency’s coordinator. “It was fantastic but dangerous and uncomfortable, the roof was slippery, and all in all it was stressful.”
