Volcanoes above the city, salmon rivers below — Russia's edge of the earth
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is the capital of the Kamchatka Peninsula, one of the most volcanically active regions on Earth. Koryaksky and Avachinsky volcanoes rise directly above the city; the surrounding wilderness holds brown bears, spawning salmon rivers, Valley of Geysers, and some of the world's finest sea kayaking in Avacha Bay.
The city was founded in 1740 by Danish-born Russian explorer Vitus Bering, who named it after his two ships — St Peter and St Paul. In 1854, during the Crimean War, a joint Anglo-French naval force attempted to capture the port and was repelled by a garrison a fraction of the size of the attacking fleet — one of Russia's few outright military victories of that war. For most of the Soviet era, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky was a closed military city, inaccessible to foreigners, which preserved the peninsula's extraordinary wilderness almost entirely intact.