Zhigulevsk lies at the foot of the Zhiguli Hills on the right bank of the Volga, where the river makes a huge loop called the Samara Bend. The hills rise from the water like a green wall, topped with limestone and forest, and they are the only real mountains for hundreds of kilometres of otherwise flat steppe. Within a short distance, the climate shifts, and the Zhigulis carry plants and animals found nowhere else, some of them relics of the ice age.
The town has a very twentieth-century origin. It was built in the early 1950s to house the workers who constructed the Zhiguli hydroelectric dam, one of the largest of the Volga cascade, which turned the river into a long reservoir known locally as the Kuibyshev Sea. Across the dam is Togliatti, the car city where the Lada was made, and the model once sold abroad under the name Zhiguli. The name has a famous second life too, as the Zhigulevskoye beer, brewed in Samara since the nineteenth century by an Austrian-born brewer, which became the Soviet Union's standard lager.
The landscape is the real attraction. The Zhiguli National Park covers much of the hills, with oak and pine forest, limestone cliffs, caves and views of the Volga from the high bluffs. The painter Ilya Repin spent summers in the village of Shiryaevo in the early 1870s while working on his most famous painting, Barge Haulers on the Volga, and the village has a museum in his honour. The cliffs along the bank there offer a long view over the river and the islands.
The roads in the hills twist and climb with steep short sections, and the forests are cool in summer. The surface varies from smooth asphalt on the main road to rough patches on the small routes. Traffic on the highways is heavy with trucks, but the mountain lanes are quiet during the week. Wild boar and deer appear on the roads at dusk.
Zhigulevsk has fuel, supermarkets and cafés, and it is a good base for exploring. Fish from the Volga, dried and smoked, is the local snack, and the markets sell honey and apples from the surrounding villages. Summer is hot and dry, and the best months are May and September, when the hills are green or golden and the air is clear.