Visiting Yekaterinburg, Russia: Top Sights on Foot
Things to Do in Yekaterinburg, Russia
Looking for things to do in Yekaterinburg? The capital of the Urals combines imperial history, religious landmarks, museums, music, constructivist heritage, and unusual public art. Its museums and historic buildings also reveal the city’s changing identity, from the Romanov period and industrial development to the Soviet era and contemporary Russia. Neywo offers a free audio guide to Yekaterinburg with 118 narrated places.
What to See in Yekaterinburg
The city has enough landmarks for several different walks. These are some of the most distinctive places to include in a visit.
Filitz Mansion and contemporary art
The Filitz Mansion stands on Mamina-Sibiryaka Street in Yekaterinburg’s historic center. This elegant residence is recognized as an architectural monument and now houses the Yekaterinburg Gallery of Contemporary Art. It is a good example of how the city’s historic buildings continue to serve cultural purposes.
Church of All Saints
The Church of All Saints, commonly known as the Church on the Blood, stands on the site of the former Ipatiev House. Nicholas II, Alexandra, their five children, and four servants were executed there on July 17, 1918. The house was demolished in 1977, and the church was built between 2000 and 2003.
Its five golden domes follow the Russian-Byzantine tradition. Inside, the upper church is bright and spacious, with a white-marble iconostasis. The lower church is deliberately darker and more intimate, with a crypt dedicated to the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.
Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Hall
Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Hall is a central institution in Yekaterinburg’s classical-music scene. It became an Academic Philharmonic in 1998, a title recognizing its artistic and cultural importance. The hall is part of the city’s long-standing musical tradition, alongside the Urals Mussorgsky State Conservatoire and its opera and theater institutions.
Ural Federal University
Ural Federal University is one of Russia’s ten federal universities and an important center for education and research in the Urals. It was formed through the merger of Ural State Technical University and Ural State University. The merger process began with a decree in October 2009, and the second university formally joined in February 2011.
The university offers programs in four broad areas, covering 108 academic majors. On campus, the Alley of Memory provides a quieter space among the university buildings.
Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore
The Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore dates back to 1870 and is one of the oldest and largest museum institutions in the Urals. Its main building is the former mansion of Alfons Koziełł-Poklewski, a Polish entrepreneur whose business interests included distilling, brewing, and banking across Siberia and the Urals.
The collections cover archaeology, ethnography, natural history, and the cultural heritage of the region. They also explain the geology and mineral wealth that helped make the Urals an industrial center.
Vladimir Vysotsky Museum
The Vladimir Vysotsky Museum occupies the second and third floors of the Vysotsky skyscraper. Opened in 2012, it is dedicated to the work of Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky. Its setting inside a modern tower gives the memorial museum an especially distinctive relationship with the city around it.
Urals Mussorgsky State Conservatoire
The Urals Mussorgsky State Conservatoire has shaped musical life in the Urals, Siberia, and the Russian Far East for nearly a century. It opened in 1934 as the fifth conservatory in Russia and the first established after the October Revolution.
Originally called the Sverdlovsk Conservatory, it was renamed in 1945 after composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. Today, it remains a federal state university for musicians, composers, and musicologists.
St. Anne’s Church
St. Anne’s Church is a Roman Catholic church on Gogolya Street. It serves as the parish church of the Ural Deanery within the Diocese of Novosibirsk and the Archdiocese of the Mother of God in Moscow. Its presence adds another layer to Yekaterinburg’s religious and cultural landscape.
Pavel Bazhov Memorial House-Museum
The Pavel Bazhov Memorial House-Museum preserves the home where Ural writer Pavel Petrovich Bazhov lived. The museum focuses on his life and work and offers a more intimate way to explore the region’s literary heritage.
Yekaterinburg Arena
Yekaterinburg Arena was originally built between 1953 and 1957 as a Soviet multi-purpose stadium. It was reconstructed from 2006 to 2011 and then rebuilt between 2015 and 2017 to meet FIFA standards for the 2018 World Cup.
Four group-stage matches were played there during the tournament: Egypt–Uruguay, France–Peru, Japan–Senegal, and Mexico–Switzerland. The stadium’s history connects Soviet architecture with contemporary football.
The Keyboard Monument
The Keyboard Monument is one of Yekaterinburg’s most unusual landmarks. Created by artist Anatoly Vyatkin in 2005, it consists of concrete keys arranged as a full QWERTY keyboard, including letters, numbers, function keys, and symbols.
The keys are placed directly on the ground without fences or barriers. Visitors can walk across them, sit on the spacebar, or use the monument as an informal meeting place. Nearby, the Gamayun Cultural Centre focuses on the history and traditions of the Ural region.
Ural Mineralogical Museum
The Ural Mineralogical Museum, also known as the Museum of Stone, is a private collection devoted to the mineral wealth of the Urals. After being displayed at the Bolshoy Ural hotel from 2000 to 2015 and later in Pervouralsk, it moved in 2018 to the Glavny Prospekt Arts Center on Lenin Avenue.
Boris Yeltsin Monument
The Monument to Boris Yeltsin stands outside the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center. Yeltsin spent much of his life in Yekaterinburg and built his political career in the region before becoming Russia’s first president after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The monument and the presidential center belong together as places for considering his legacy. The statue has also been repeatedly targeted by vandals, reflecting the continuing debate around his role in Russian history.
Ernst Neizvestny Art Museum
The Ernst Neizvestny Art Museum is located in the former Petelina House, a stone merchant’s mansion from the mid-1800s and a protected cultural heritage site. Opened on April 9, 2013, Neizvestny’s 88th birthday, it was the first museum in Russia devoted entirely to the artist’s work.
The collection includes paintings, drawings, etchings, book illustrations, small sculptures, jewelry, illustrated books, and photographs. Since Ernst Neizvestny was born in Yekaterinburg, the museum also connects the city with one of its notable artistic figures.
Exploring Yekaterinburg with Neywo
A Yekaterinburg self-guided walking tour is an easy way to connect the city’s museums, churches, monuments, and historic streets without joining a group. Neywo has seven walking tours and one bus route, with narration available in 11 languages.
The walks cover different sides of the city:
- The Romanovs’ Last Days and the Hill of Merchants: 2.45 km, 95 minutes, 11 narrated stops.
- Plotinka: A Keyboard, the Beatles and the Iset River: 2.97 km, 115 minutes, 11 stops.
- 1905 Square, Yeltsin and the Museums of the West Bank: 3.42 km, 110 minutes, 10 stops.
- Lenin Avenue: Stage, Stone and Revolution: 2.18 km, 83 minutes, 9 stops.
- Gems, Mines and Old Believers South of the Centre: 3.65 km, 104 minutes, 10 stops.
- Uralmash: Constructivism and the White Tower: 2.26 km, 63 minutes, 5 stops.
- Verkh-Isetsky: Wooden Houses and the Old Plant: 2.6 km, 68 minutes, 6 stops.
The bus route, Bus 030: Down Lenin Avenue to the Opera and Beyond, covers 4.5 km in 19 minutes and includes 8 narrated stops. The app tells the story of each place as you reach it, at your own pace, with no group and no schedule.
Download Neywo for Yekaterinburg
Download Neywo to explore Yekaterinburg with a free audio guide covering 118 narrated places. Choose a walk through Romanov history, museums, music, minerals, or industrial heritage, or take the bus route down Lenin Avenue. The narration starts as you arrive at each stop, so you can explore independently and spend as much time as you like at every place.
Yekaterinburg is one of the most distinctive destinations in Russia, where history, culture, and the industrial heritage of the Urals meet in one city.
Places with an audio guide in Yekaterinburg
8 places in Yekaterinburg with a Neywo audio guide. Each one starts telling its story as you reach it.
Self-guided tours in Yekaterinburg
8 tours in Yekaterinburg, free in the Neywo app. Each stop tells its story as you reach it.
- Bus ride
Bus 030: Down Lenin Avenue to the Opera and Beyond
A regular city bus that follows Yekaterinburg's main axis, Lenin Avenue: from Trinity Cathedral and the Nevyansk icons past the metro and the Vysotsky tower to Sverdlov's monument, the friends' sculpture on the avenue, the Kolyada Theatre and Kirov Square. A cheap way to see the Soviet-era boulevard.
Trinity Cathedral · Nevyansk Icon Museum · Yekaterinburg Metro · Vladimir Vysotsky museum in Yekaterinburg · Monument to Yakov Sverdlov · Kolyada Theatre …
Open this tour: Bus 030: Down Lenin Avenue to the Opera and Beyond - Walk
The Romanovs' Last Days and the Hill of Merchants
Begin at the columned palace of an Old Believer merchant on Annunciation Hill, climb to the oldest surviving stone church in the city, then reach the white Church on the Blood, raised on the spot where the last tsar's family spent its final 78 days. Continue through the Literary Quarter's wooden houses and theatre, past a photographer's house and the museum of the city's story, and finish at a brick mansion with a paper aeroplane on its wall and the chapel that marks a lost cathedral.
Rastorguyev-Kharitonov Palace · Ascension Church · Church of All Saints · Ipatiev House · Chamber Theater of the United Museum of Writers of the Urals · Tolmachyov street 41 …
Open this tour: The Romanovs' Last Days and the Hill of Merchants - Walk
Plotinka: A Keyboard, the Beatles and the Iset River
Yekaterinburg grew around an ironworks dam on the Iset. Walk the old centre from the Vysotsky tower and the metro that was the last built in the Soviet Union, past the city's great library, a giant concrete keyboard and Russia's first Beatles monument, to icons painted by Old Believers, a stately mansion and the classical cathedral that began as an Old Believer church.
Vladimir Vysotsky museum in Yekaterinburg · Yekaterinburg Metro · Sverdlovsk regional universal scientific library named after V. G. Belinsky · St. Anne's Church, Yekaterinburg · Filitz Mansion, Yekaterinburg · Nevyansk Icon Museum …
Open this tour: Plotinka: A Keyboard, the Beatles and the Iset River - Walk
1905 Square, Yeltsin and the Museums of the West Bank
From the Boris Yeltsin Center, named best museum in Europe in 2017, past the Yeltsin monument and the drama theatre to the oldest square in the city with its Lenin statue and clock-tower Duma. Then cross to the museum quarter: the conservatoire, a museum of architecture on the dam, a Polish distiller's mansion full of Ural nature, an art museum in a building from 1730 and the museum of a sculptor born here.
Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center · Monument to Boris Yeltsin in Yekaterinburg · Sverdlovsk Academic Theatre of Drama · Urals Mussorgsky State Conservatoire · 1905 Square · City Duma of Yekaterinburg …
Open this tour: 1905 Square, Yeltsin and the Museums of the West Bank - Walk
Lenin Avenue: Stage, Stone and Revolution
A walk along the city's grand avenue, from Labor Square, the oldest on the left bank, and a classical former pharmacy that now celebrates Ural gems, past the philharmonic and the theatres that kept their Soviet names to the opera house with its three Muses. Then on to a bronze revolutionary on a granite boulder, the campus where a Soviet university took a writer's name, a memorial to soldiers who did not return and the regional history museum.
Labor Square · Lenina Avenue 37 · Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Hall · Sverdlovsk state academic theatre of musical Comedy · Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theatre · Monument to Yakov Sverdlov …
Open this tour: Lenin Avenue: Stage, Stone and Revolution - Walk
Gems, Mines and Old Believers South of the Centre
Head south and west of the centre to the university that trained the Urals' mining engineers and its geological museum, the great Novo-Tikhvinsky convent, a chapel in the dendropark and the synagogue that stands on the site of the lost main synagogue. Return along the Iset past the stone Tsarsky Bridge, an Old Believer church, the first Armenian church of the Urals and the house of the storyteller Bazhov.
Ural Geological Museum · Ural State Mining University · Novo-Tikhvinsky Monastery · 8 March street 68, Yekaterinburg · Chapel of Saint Alexander Nevsky in Yekaterinburg · Kuybysheva Street 38, Yekaterinburg …
Open this tour: Gems, Mines and Old Believers South of the Centre - Walk
Uralmash: Constructivism and the White Tower
Leave the old centre for Uralmash, the Soviet factory district built in the first Five-Year Plan. Visit the plant's museum in the old checkpoint, the main square, a church in the former Madrid Hotel, a monument to a wartime spy and the White Tower, one of the city's boldest constructivist landmarks.
Square of Pervoy Pyatiletki · Monument to Nikolai Kuznetsov in Yekaterinburg · White Tower
Open this tour: Uralmash: Constructivism and the White Tower - Walk
Verkh-Isetsky: Wooden Houses and the Old Plant
A quiet walk in the old Verkh-Isetsk plant district west of the centre: a rare wooden mansion, the restored plant hospital that is now the Sinara Center, the western end of Lenin Avenue, a private museum of Ural stone and two wooden estates, one of them with an unusual museum.
Brevnovy House, Yekaterinburg · Hospital of Verkh-Isetsky Plant · Kommunarov Square · UralʹskiÄ mineralogicheskiÄ muzeÄ V.A. Pelepenko · Kazantsev House, Yekaterinburg · Kolobov House, Yekaterinburg
Open this tour: Verkh-Isetsky: Wooden Houses and the Old Plant
Walk Yekaterinburg with Neywo
Neywo turns Yekaterinburg into a self-guided audio tour. Stories arrive as you reach the place they belong to, and the route reshapes when you wander off it.
