Kaluga Region

Local guides call Kaluga the “cradle of cosmonautics” and, in general, they aren’t wrong. This is where Konstantin Tsiolkovsky lived and where Russia’s first museum of cosmonautics is located, which was created with the participation of Yuri Gagarin and Sergei Korolev and named after Tsiolkovsky. Kaluga also has its own planetarium and many monuments dedicated to space exploration.

Kaluga Region is also a place of attraction for contemporary art lovers. Thanks to the huge Nikola-Lenivets Art Park, which annually hosts the ‘Archstoyanie’ festival, where more and more new land art objects appear. The most famous ones are ‘Bobur’ and ‘Universal Mind’. 

Another attraction of the region is the town of Tarusa, which once became a magnet for many writers and poets: Konstantin Paustovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Zabolotsky lived here, while Bella Akhmadulina vacationed here. All of them observed the picturesque bank of the Oka River and the tranquil Central Russian landscapes.