The Leaning Tower of Nevyansk stands in the centre of Nevyansk, in Demidov Square, about 88 km north of Yekaterinburg. It is the tower of the Demidovs, the owners of the Nevyansk ironworks, and today it is part of the Nevyansk State Historical and Architectural Museum.
At the bottom of the tower is a square block; above it rise three octagonal tiers with balconies, topped by a spire. The tower is 57.5 m high.
The lean is obvious at first sight, but it is more complex than it looks. The bottom tier leans the most, by 3°16′. Higher up the builders straightened the masonry: the middle tiers lean by about one degree, and the top is almost vertical, with the upper floors even leaning slightly the other way. So the tower is not tilted as a whole but bent, and its top is only 1.8–2.2 m off the vertical, depending on the source. The top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is displaced by about 3.9 m, twice as much. On the other hand, the Nevyansk tower is slightly taller than Pisa's, which stands at 55.9–56.7 m. The lean is not increasing: according to measurements from 1991, the tower settles by 0.9 mm a year.
The museum names the tower's rooms as follows: the works archive, the treasury office, a prison and an assay laboratory. Demidov's study was on the second floor. On the third stood the furnaces of the assay laboratory, and traces of silver and gold were found in the soot from their flues: museum staff sent a sample for analysis in 1956. Hence the legends that the Demidovs secretly minted counterfeit coins here or smelted undeclared silver from the Altai. But assay furnaces exist precisely to smelt ore samples, and no coins, dies or minting equipment have been found in the tower. Underground passages were discovered beneath the factory buildings, but not beneath the tower itself. On the sixth floor there is a whispering room: the vault is built so that a whisper in one corner can be heard in another.
The spire is crowned by a gilded ball with spikes. It is earthed through the metal frame and ties in the masonry and does conduct lightning. It was installed sometime between 1721 and 1745, while Franklin proposed the lightning rod in 1749. So the earthed spire may well be older than Franklin's lightning rod, although there are no documents showing that it was designed as one.
Since April 2025 the tower has been under restoration, covering the facade, clock faces, stairs and utilities; the region allocated 104 million roubles for the work. Since February 2026 visitors have been allowed inside again, although the work is not finished, and in May 2026 the tower stood entirely in scaffolding. It is worth checking whether the scaffolding has come down before you go.
From Yekaterinburg, the Lastochka train towards Nizhny Tagil takes about 1 hour 20 minutes to Nevyansk, and an ordinary suburban train about two hours. There are scheduled buses from the Northern and Southern bus stations, and by car the route is the Serov highway. Summer is the best time to come: the tower's open platforms and balconies are accessible only in the warm season and are closed in winter.
