The Touristic Urals

The Ural Mountains are a magnificent museum of geology created by nature: almost all the elements from Mendeleyev’s classification table can be found there. Iron ore is looked upon as the principal treasure of this museum leaving behind platinum and gold

Ore, machinery, metal, the whole of the Urals, its history past and future stand behind those three words which describe the main feature of the region. The Sverdlovsk region occupies a prominent place on the industrial map of the country. Iron ore is mined in the south, and there are rich deposits of coal, copper, manganese, gold, aluminum, and potash. The economic potential of the Middle Urals is very high: there are hundreds of industrial enterprises and construction organizations in here. The machine building industry of the Urals in general features a strongly pronounced trend towards heavy engineering.

Nizhny Tagil is one of the most important regional centers for iron, steel and the engineering industry, called by right “the Iron capital” of the Middle Urals. In Nizhny Tagil an oxygen-converter plant started up – the first in the country and the largest in Europe. The city also hosts the Mining Ural Museum, a unique complex with 10 different museums. It is the first of its kind in Russia.

Unfortunately, a great number of industrial plants concentrated in the Urals cause a lot of harm to ecology of the region. On the one hand the Urals is one of the most beautiful and richest in natural resources regions in the world, on the other hand there is environmental crisis in the Urals. Air pollution, water pollution and soil pollution are extremely high in the Middle Urals. The main polluters in the Urals are enterprises of mining and chemical industries, ferrous and non-ferrous metal plants.  It is a big problem that has no easy solution, but the government tries its best.