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Coverage / Estonia

Estonia

Northern Europe

A small Baltic state of dense forests, raised bogs and more than 2,000 islands, where a UNESCO song-festival tradition and Voromaa smoke-sauna heritage sit beside brown-bear forests, national-park wetlands, and the Hanseatic old town of Tallinn.

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What you can do in Estonia

Culinary / Cooking

Tallinnyear-roundEstonia's food has quietly become one of the Baltics' most interesting, and Tallinn is where you learn to cook it. New Nordic thinking landed here on top of a deep larder of black rye bread, Baltic herring and sprats, forest mushrooms, berries and game, and the city's cooking studios teach that mix hands-on. In a class you take the ideas, then cook a full multi-course Estonian meal from scratch with a chef at your shoulder before sitting down to eat it. It is a low-key, generous way into a culture that treats foraging and seasonality as second nature, and it works year-round whatever the weather outside.

Film Festivals

Tallinn Black Nights Film FestivalTallinnNovThe Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, POFF, turns the dark of the northern November into one of Europe's most serious film events. It is the only A-list festival in the Baltics and Nordics, one of around fifteen worldwide accredited by FIAPF alongside Cannes, Venice and Berlin, and across sixteen days it screens some 250 features and 300 shorts to about 90,000 admissions. The pull is the combination of scale and setting: a genuine industry festival with competitions and premieres, held in a compact medieval city where snow is likely and the whole thing feels intimate rather than red-carpet distant. Sub-festivals for shorts, children's films and animation run alongside the main programme.

Museums & Galleries

Tallinnyear-roundTallinn holds two museums that between them tell Estonia's art and its seafaring in unforgettable buildings. Kumu, the flagship of the Art Museum of Estonia, is the largest art museum in the Baltics, a copper-and-limestone landmark in Kadriorg park that carries Estonian art from eighteenth-century portraiture through the strange, potent painting of the Soviet decades to contemporary work. Down on the water, the Seaplane Harbour fills a monumental 1917 hangar with a real submarine, a steam icebreaker and a seaplane, one of the most atmospheric maritime museums in Europe. One is high art under a modern roof, the other history you walk through and climb aboard, and both run full English-language displays.

Music & Culture Festivals

Viljandi Folk Music FestivalViljandiJulThe Viljandi Folk Music Festival is the warm heart of Estonia's summer. For four days in late July the small southern town of Viljandi, and especially the grassy ruins of its medieval castle hills above a lake, becomes the biggest folk-music gathering in the Baltics, with around nine stages, some sixty acts from Estonia and across the world, and tens of thousands of visitors. It grew out of Viljandi's role as the centre of Estonian traditional-music teaching, so the festival is as much about participation as spectacle: instrument and dance workshops, open jam sessions and a craft fair run alongside the concerts. The setting, music drifting over castle ramparts and lake at the long northern dusk, is the thing people come back for.

Trekking / Hiking

SoomaaMar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctSoomaa means land of bogs, and walking on those bogs is the signature Estonian hike. This national park of raised mires, flooded forest and four rivers is best crossed on bogshoes, wide frames that let you pad across the spongy sphagnum surface of mires thousands of years old and studded with dark pools. The park runs on five seasons rather than four: the fifth is the great spring flood, when snowmelt and rain lift the rivers by several metres and submerge the forests, and you swap boots for a canoe. Guided bogshoe walks and canoe trips both put you deep into a wilderness that feels far larger than Estonia's flat map suggests, with beavers, elk and cranes for company.

Wildlife Safaris

AlutaguseApr May Jun Jul Aug SepEstonia's brown bears are the reason to come to Alutaguse. This belt of western-taiga forest and bog in the northeast holds the densest bear population in the country, part of a national total of around 1,000 animals, and it is one of the most reliable places in Europe to watch wild brown bears from a hide. You settle into a forest hide in the evening and wait as bears, raccoon dogs, wild boar, roe deer and the occasional elk emerge into a flooded meadow, with the long northern summer light stretching the viewing well into the night. Beyond bears, the same forests hold wolves, lynx and flying squirrels, so the wider wildlife cast is wild, not provisioned.

Witness / Attend

Voruyear-roundThe smoke sauna of Old Voromaa is one of the deepest living traditions in Estonia, and UNESCO added it to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2014. This is not a spa. In the hills of the southeast, a smoke sauna is a windowless log room with no chimney, heated for hours until the smoke is let out and the blackened walls hold a soft, heavy heat. Historically it was where babies were born, the sick were healed, meat was smoked and the dead were washed, and Voro families still treat it as a place of quiet and cleansing rather than sport. At a heritage farm you take part in the full ritual over several hours, guided through the whisking, the washing, the sauna words and the smoked food, in the company of the people who keep the tradition alive.

Best months at a glance

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Culinary
Film Festivals
Museums
Music Festivals
Trekking
Wildlife Safaris
Witness / Attend

Upcoming events in Estonia