Lahemaa was designated in 1971 as the first national park in the entire Soviet Union — an unlikely piece of Estonian persistence — and covers a stretch of the north coast about an hour east of Tallinn. It packs the country's characteristic landscapes into one accessible area: bog, pine forest, boulder-strewn coast and restored manor houses.
Viru bog
The Viru raba is the easiest introduction to Estonian bogland and the most visited. A wooden boardwalk of about three and a half kilometres crosses the open bog past dark pools and stunted pines, with an observation tower partway. It takes an hour, requires no fitness at all, and shows a landscape most visitors have never seen: waterlogged, acidic, thousands of years in the making and growing about a millimetre a year.
Go at dawn if you can. Mist over the bog pools at sunrise is the single most photographed thing in Estonian nature, and deservedly.
The manors
The Baltic German nobility left a chain of manor houses across this region. Palmse is the most completely restored — a pale baroque house with park, lake and outbuildings, presented as a museum of the estate system. Sagadi houses a forestry museum, and Vihula operates as a hotel.
Together they explain a great deal about Estonian history: a Baltic German landowning class ruling an Estonian peasantry, an arrangement that lasted until the land reform of 1919.
The coast
Käsmu is known as the captains' village: in the nineteenth century an extraordinary proportion of its inhabitants were sea captains, and the wooden houses along its single street were built on that money. There is a small maritime museum, and a path along the shore past enormous erratic boulders left by the retreating ice sheet — Estonia has some of the largest in Northern Europe.
The peninsulas of Pärispea, Juminda and Vergi each end in a lighthouse and a quiet stretch of shoreline. Altja, with its net sheds and swing, is the most photographed fishing village on the coast.
Practical
Lahemaa works as a day trip from Tallinn but rewards an overnight in one of the manor hotels or guesthouses. There is no entrance fee. Bring insect repellent between June and August — the bog produces mosquitoes in quantities that surprise first-time visitors.