Russia · Sverdlovsk Oblast
Where to Stay in Asbest, Sverdlovsk Oblast
Asbest lies on the Bolshoy Reft on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, 70 kilometres north-east of Yekaterinburg, and dates from 1889.
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Where to stay in Asbest
Each area has its own feel; here's who each one suits.
Yekaterinburg is the honest alternative. Seventy kilometres separate the two, and a traveller who wants choice in rooms, restaurants and onward connections will find all of it in the regional capital rather than in Asbest, which is a working town first and a place to sleep second. That said, the distance is short.
A day here and a bed there is a reasonable arrangement. The old Kudelka ground is the town's core. Everything civic gathers in the compact part of the 107 square kilometres the municipality covers, and rooms taken there put the rest of Asbest within a short run, which matters in a place whose built area sits inside a much larger administrative boundary.
The Bolshoy Reft is the other reference. The river crosses the town on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, and a stay near the water trades the civic centre for open ground and the wooded country of Sverdlovsk Oblast beyond it. Expect a thin market either way.
If you are here for the industry rather than the landscape, take the centre and treat Yekaterinburg as the fallback when nothing in Asbest is free.
About Asbest
The mineral named the town.
What is Asbest known for?
Asbest carries the Russian word for the fibrous stone, and the settlement that grew here from 1889 went by Kudelka before that older name gave way, a word the record renders as Sliver. Sverdlovsk Oblast frames it. The town covers some 107 square kilometres on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, with the Bolshoy Reft running through it and Yekaterinburg 70 kilometres off to the south-west.
What are the main landmarks in Asbest?
Landscape does the work here. The Ural Mountains rise to the west and Asbest sits on their eastern slopes, so the horizon rather than any single building is what fixes the town in the memory of anyone passing through. The Bolshoy Reft supplies the other.
Its channel crosses the municipal ground, and the extraction industry that gave the town both its name and its founding date in 1889 shapes the country around it far more than architecture does.
What is the history of Asbest?
1889 is the founding date. What began then on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains was a settlement raised for the working of a fibrous mineral, in country that had drawn prospectors east of Yekaterinburg for generations before it. The first name was Kudelka.
The record glosses it as Sliver, a word taken from the look of the material itself, and it stayed attached to the place through its early decades before the plainer industrial name displaced it. Asbest replaced Kudelka on the map. The change said what the town was for, and it aligned the settlement with the substance that had brought people to this stretch of the Bolshoy Reft in the first place.
Sverdlovsk Oblast set the later frame. The town came to hold some 107 square kilometres of it, a boundary drawn around workings and open country rather than around streets, which is why the administrative area runs so far past the built part. Yekaterinburg stayed the anchor.
Seventy kilometres to the south-west, the regional capital supplied the administration, the transport and the wider labour market that a single-industry town on the eastern slopes of the Urals could never provide for itself.
Where is Asbest?
Eastern slopes, not western. Asbest sits on the far flank of the Ural Mountains, well inside Russia, on the Bolshoy Reft, holding some 107 square kilometres of Sverdlovsk Oblast within a boundary far wider than its built streets. Yekaterinburg lies 70 kilometres off.
The regional capital is the nearest large place to the south-west, and the country between the two runs across the same eastern side of the range.
What is the climate of Asbest?
The Ural Mountains stand in the way. Asbest lies on their eastern flank in the temperate band of the northern hemisphere, with the range between the town and any air coming off the Atlantic, which leaves the year swinging hard between its two ends. The Bolshoy Reft freezes with it.
Yekaterinburg, 70 kilometres away on the same side of the Urals, keeps much the same calendar across Sverdlovsk Oblast.
How do you get to Asbest?
Everything comes through Yekaterinburg. The regional capital lies 70 kilometres to the south-west, and the run north-east from it across Sverdlovsk Oblast is the standard approach to Asbest for anyone arriving by air or long-distance rail. The Bolshoy Reft marks the arrival.
Its crossing sits on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, and the built part of the town gathers close to it rather than spreading across the wide municipal boundary.
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Updated August 2026