In this article I’m sharing the three official maps of St. Petersburg that are worth downloading before your trip: the historic centre, the surroundings and the metro. All three are free, designed specifically for tourists, easy to print at home and just as easy to check from your phone offline.
The maps of the centre and the surroundings are distributed through the official city tourism portal. The metro map is published directly by the public company that runs the underground. I’m linking to them here so you can download them in high resolution and, if you’d rather have them on paper, I’ll also tell you where to pick them up for free once you arrive.
1. Tourist map of St. Petersburg city centre
This is the most useful map for your first days in the city. It covers the entire historic core in detail: from Vasilievsky Island and the Peter and Paul Fortress in the north, all the way to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in the south-east, and includes all of Nevsky Prospekt, the major canals (Moika, Griboyedov, Fontanka) and the main tourist neighbourhoods.
The good thing is that it’s not just a street plan. Beyond the landmarks and museums —the Hermitage, the Mariinsky Theatre, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Admiralty, the Russian Museum— it shows bus, tram and trolleybus routes with their numbers, metro stations marked with the “M” icon, and the location of the tourist information offices. It’s the closest thing to a paper GPS.
It’s labelled in English with double-naming in Russian for streets and landmarks, so even if you don’t read Cyrillic you can match the name on the street sign with the one on the map. It also shows the cruise terminals at the Marine Façade and the main piers for the tourist boats that cruise the canals.
Download map of St. Petersburg city centre (4.5 MB)
If you’d rather not download and print it, you can ask for this same map for free in paper format at any of the tourist information offices around the city. The most central one is at 14 Sadovaya Street, a one-minute walk from Nevsky Prospekt. They also have themed editions there (museums, canal routes, food) and neighbourhood booklets.
2. Tourist map of the St. Petersburg surroundings
The second essential map is the one for the surroundings. It’s the one you’ll want for the day —or days— you spend on excursions out of the city, and there are several of those, almost all of them must-dos on a first visit.
It covers the entire suburban belt around St. Petersburg: Peterhof to the west, Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo) with the Catherine Palace, Pavlovsk with its imperial park, Gatchina, Lomonosov (the former Oranienbaum), Kronstadt on its island in the Gulf of Finland, and to the north the area of Sestroretsk, Repino and Komarovo along the Karelian Isthmus, all the way up to Vyborg on the Finnish border.
The most useful part of the map is that, for each destination, it tells you which suburban rail line, which bus or which marshrutka (minibus) leaves from which metro station, with the route number and approximate travel times. It saves you loads of searching, helps you work out whether an excursion fits in a morning or needs a full day, and makes clear which terminal you need to start from (Baltiysky, Vitebsky, Finlyandsky or Moskovsky, depending on where you’re going).
It also marks the Marine Façade docks and the “Meteor” hydrofoils that link the centre of St. Petersburg with Peterhof across the gulf during the navigation season.
Download map of the St. Petersburg surroundings (4.2 MB)
3. St. Petersburg Metro map
This is the official St. Petersburg metro map in a bilingual Russian-English version. It’s published by the public company that operates the underground and is exactly the same map you’ll see printed in station halls and on platforms.
On the map you’ll find every line in its assigned colour, the stations labelled in both Cyrillic and Latin script, the connections to the main railway terminals —Moskovsky, Finlyandsky, Baltiysky, Vitebsky, Ladozhsky— and an aeroplane icon marking the station you should head to for Pulkovo Airport (blue line, Moskovskaya stop). Bus terminals and seaports are also shown.
The St. Petersburg metro is one of the deepest in the world, so the escalator symbols and the corridor icons between interchange stations are particularly useful for working out how long it actually takes you to change lines: sometimes it’s several minutes just walking from one platform to the next.
If you go down into the metro at any station, you’ll find this same map blown up large on the walls of the hall and as a free folding leaflet handed out at the ticket booths. So if you don’t want to keep it on your phone, you only need to grab one on your first day and slip it in your pocket.
Download map of the St. Petersburg Metro
If you want to know how the fares, Podorozhnik cards, tokens and tourist passes work, you’ll find everything in my guide to public transport in St. Petersburg.
Maps on your phone: the apps that work best in St. Petersburg
Image maps are perfect for getting the big picture, finding your bearings without battery, and sharing them with whoever you’re travelling with. For day-to-day navigation, I recommend pairing them with three mobile apps:
- Yandex Maps: it’s the Russian equivalent of Google Maps and works much better than Google inside Russia. Walking routes, real public-transport timetables, bus numbers with their estimated waiting time, and far more reliable information for shops, restaurants and opening hours.
- Yandex Metro: a dedicated app for getting around the underground. It calculates the exact time between any two stations, shows transfer corridors and warns you if a station is closed for refurbishment.
- Google Maps is still useful for an overview and for saving points of interest before the trip, but its public-transport data in St. Petersburg is quite outdated.
For these apps to work without hiccups, you’ll want local mobile data. I cover it in detail in my guides to the Russian SIM card and the best eSIMs for Russia.
Once you have the maps on your phone or on paper, the next step is to plan your route. If you’re going to spend one to four days in the city, I’ll help you map it out with my itineraries for St. Petersburg.
Frequently asked questions about St. Petersburg maps
Where can I get a free paper map in St. Petersburg?
At the tourist information offices spread around the city. The main one is at 14 Sadovaya Street, a minute away from Nevsky Prospekt. They’ll give you both the city-centre map and the surroundings map, free of charge and in several languages.
What language are the official tourist maps in?
In English, with double labelling in Russian for street names, metro stations and landmarks. It’s the standard for tourist maps published by the city and very handy for matching what you read on the street signs with what you see on the map.
Does Google Maps work in St. Petersburg?
Yes, it works, but its public-transport data and bus arrival times are quite outdated compared to reality. For getting around the city, Yandex Maps is far more accurate, especially when it comes to timetables and routes.
Do I need an offline map if I’m using my phone?
It’s not essential if you have a Russian SIM or eSIM with data. If you’d rather not rely on a connection, download the St. Petersburg area on Google Maps or Maps.me before the trip, and save the JPG files from this article to your phone gallery too.
Which metro station do I get off at for Pulkovo Airport?
Moskovskaya, on the blue line (line 2). From the metro exit you can take city buses 39 or 39E, which run straight to the terminal in around 20 minutes. All the transport info for Pulkovo is also marked on the metro map itself.
