Babolovsky Park, Protected park in Pushkin, Russia

Babolovsky Park is the largest of the Tsarskoye Selo parks, covering 268.6 hectares between southern Pushkin and Aleksandrovskaya, northwest of the Krasnoselskoye highway. Its centrepiece is the Babolovsky Palace, a one-storey red-brick summer building with Gothic pointed windows, crenellated parapets and an octagonal tower with a hipped roof. A straight sandy path runs beneath arching trees, and a low red-brick bridge with one wide semicircular arch and pale stone pillars crosses the Kuzminka.

The park grew from the Finnish village of Babolovo at the headwaters of the Kuzminka River. In 1773–1775 a dam-bridge was built and the Babolovsky Pond dug above it; in 1780 a wooden estate of Prince G. A. Potemkin stood on the palace site, rebuilt five years later as a red-brick Gothic bathhouse. From 1850 to 1860 marshes were drained and oaks, birches, maples and lindens planted.

The name Babolovo comes from the Finnish village that stood here before the park. In 1783 an English garden was laid out beside the palace, and the granite bath became a summer bathing place for the court. Visitors today can look for the red-brick bridge with its three pale stone pillars over the Kuzminka.

The park lies between the southern edge of Pushkin and Aleksandrovskaya, northwest of the Krasnoselskoye highway, with the Kuzminka river and its ponds running through it. A wide circular road follows the park boundaries, and clearings cut through the woods serve as walking and carriage routes. The ground is former marshland drained in the 1850s and 1860s, so paths can be soft after rain.

The granite bath inside Babolovsky Palace was carved from a single 160-tonne block of red granite with greenish labradorite flecks, shipped from a Finnish island. Stonecutter Samson Sukhanov, who also worked on the Rostral Columns in St Petersburg, polished it on site over ten years, 1818–1828. The basin weighs 48 tonnes and holds 8,000 buckets of water.