North-West

The North-West region has unique recreational resources: outstanding historical and architectural monuments are combined there with natural landscapes, which are highly valuable for organizing recreationand tourism areas. The nature of the North-West region is peaceful taiga landscapes full of calm beauty, into which ancient wooden huts of northern villages and Orthodox churches organically fit. Wavy sandy lowlands there pass into hilly terrain and ridges. The lowlands are usually covered with endless pine forests, lots of marshes rich in cranberries and cloudberries. On hills and ridges often grow spruce or small-leaved forests of birch and aspen. There are many lakes (Ladoga, Chudskoe, Ilmen, Pskovskoe), rivers (Neva, Narva, Luga, Volkhov) and streams. The mirror  surfaces of the lakes, located in the depressions between the forested hills, give a marvelous charm to this corner of Russian nature. One of the loveliest places in the region is Valday – a favorite vacation spot for mushroomers, fishermen, tourists passionate about these hill sand lakes, depths of coniferous forests. To feed your soul there are not only clean air and shimmering surface of the lakes – here you can touch the history itself, stepping on the land of inspiration for Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov.