Narva sits on Estonia's eastern edge, with Russia directly across the river. Around ninety-five per cent of its population is Russian-speaking, and the city is essential to understanding the country as it actually is rather than as the guidebooks present it.
Two castles
The single most striking sight in the Baltics is here: the Hermann Castle on the Estonian bank and the Ivangorod fortress on the Russian one, built facing each other across a river barely a hundred and fifty metres wide. One was Livonian, the other raised by Ivan III in 1492 specifically to confront it. They have stared at each other for five centuries, and now mark an EU external border.
The Estonian castle houses a good museum and its tower can be climbed for the view across.
What was lost
Narva was one of the finest baroque towns in Northern Europe until 1944, when Soviet bombing and subsequent demolition destroyed almost all of it. The pre-war population was largely expelled or did not return, and the city was rebuilt with Soviet housing and repopulated with workers from across the USSR. That history explains its present character entirely, and the town hall — restored, standing alone among apartment blocks — makes the loss visible.
The coast and Sillamäe
Narva-Jõesuu, at the river mouth, is a resort with a long sandy beach and pine forest, popular since tsarist times and now quietly reviving.
Sillamäe is one of the strangest towns in Estonia: a closed Soviet city built around a uranium processing plant, laid out in monumental Stalinist style with a grand staircase down to the sea. It did not appear on maps until 1991.
This whole region is the oil shale belt that powered Estonian energy for decades, and the industrial landscape — including artificial ash hills you can climb — is part of the picture.
Lake Peipus
South of Narva lies Lake Peipus, Europe's fifth largest lake, forming much of the border. Its western shore holds the villages of the Old Believers, Russian Orthodox who fled persecution in the seventeenth century and settled here, preserving their rites, their icon painting and their onion-growing. The 'Onion Route' along the shore is a genuine cultural corridor, with small museums, churches and roadside stalls.
Further south, Setomaa holds another distinct culture — the Seto people, with their own language, polyphonic singing on the UNESCO list, and a symbolic king.
Practical
Narva is about two and a half hours from Tallinn by train or bus, and the train is comfortable and cheap. It is entirely safe. Russian is far more useful than Estonian here, and English is limited outside the museum.