Why Go to Tallinn? by Angela Moore

It's difficult to separate Tallinn from its medieval Old Town. It's also hard describe the Old Town without using the word 'fairytale': russet roofs, candy-coloured merchant's houses, cobbled streets with alleyways ducking off them. It's so quaint, clean and well-restored that it sometimes seems sanitised to within an inch of Disneyfication. However, there is life here: increasingly sophisticated drinking and dining and a growing arts scene. This is a city forging a personality, growing out of its dour Soviet past and its long history of subjugation.

Tallinn distilled

The romantic view from Toompea Hill, over the medieval heart of the Lower Town and out to the Baltic Coast

The multi-onion-domed, fantastical Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a Soviet legacy (and the locals' complex, uneasy relationship with it)

Also Soviet, the Hotel Viru, a brutal monolithic block, complete with KGB bugs

Winter, when the streets are snowy and silent, doors shut against the cold, and it's more Brothers Grimm than Walt Disney

Laboratorium, Kooli and Gumnaasiumi Streets: quiet, huddling beneath the medieval bastions of the city wall

Do as the locals do and head to Pirita, Tallinn's coastal stretch, for boating and bathing

Watch out for

Estonia, though an EU member, does not yet trade in Euros. They are widely accepted but the official currency remains the Kroon

Rowdy stag parties and resulting friction with annoyed locals. Tallinn sometimes seems to be taking over from Prague as the cheap-drunk-loud party destination of choice

Variation on
Stay a step ahead of the Finns that flood over here every Friday of the summer - take the ferry to Helsinki for the weekend.