Listvyanka

Listvyanka is located to the southwest of Lake Baikal near the source of the Angara. The settlement stretches in an arc along the coast at the foot of a high stony ridge.
Russian pioneers came to this spot in the middle of the 17th century, and a hundred years later there was a stage-post here. The settlement grew along with the development of navigation on Lake Baikal.
Listvyanka is now a small settlement, but it has shipbuilding and ship-repairing yards of its own.

The Baikal Sanatorium and two modern buildings of the Intourist Guest Hotel are situated on a picturesque hill above the lake.

You can get to Listvyanka from Irkutsk by bus year-round or aboard the hydrofoils "Voskhod" or "Raketa" in the summer time.

Listvyanka is the site of the Limnological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It studies the lakes and man-made reservoirs of Siberia and the Russian Far East, with particular focus on Lake Baikal. The institute has a small but very interesting museum of the flora and fauna of Baikal and its region.