Krasnodar is the informal capital of southern Russia, a sprawling city of over a million people on the Kuban River. Founded as a Cossack fort in 1793, it serves as the gateway to the Black Sea coast and the Caucasus mountains.
The city centre is greener than you might expect, with long tree-lined boulevards and Gorky Park stretching along the river. Krasnaya Street, the pedestrianised main drag, is where locals promenade on warm evenings past 19th-century merchant houses and Soviet-era cinemas. The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity is one of the few pre-Soviet religious buildings to survive intact. The Regional History Museum and the Kovalenko Art Museum are both worth a stop. The privately funded Krasnodar Stadium and its adjacent botanical garden are an unexpected highlight — one of the finest club grounds in Russia, built by a local billionaire as a civic gift. For pre-revolutionary streetscapes, Korolenko Street has a better surviving concentration of merchant architecture than the modernised main boulevard.
Krasnodar's real draw for travellers is its position: the beach resorts of Sochi, Anapa, and Gelendzhik are all within a few hours, and the western Caucasus — with skiing at Krasnaya Polyana and hiking in the Caucasus Biosphere Reserve — is easily reached from here.