Estonian Open Air Museum

The museum was founded in 1957 on the Rocca al Mare peninsula, and the idea was simple: as rural Estonia emptied and its timber buildings rotted, move the best of them here. The result is around eighty relocated structures spread over eighty hectares of pine wood along the sea, arranged as farms rather than as a row of exhibits.

What you actually see

• Complete farmsteads - houses with their threshing barns, summer kitchens, saunas and storehouses, furnished as they were used.
• The regional layout - the site follows the divisions of the country, so a Setomaa farm and a coastal Swedish one stand ten minutes apart.
• The Sutlepa church - a wooden village church moved here, alongside windmills, a schoolhouse and a fire station.
• The Kolu tavern - food cooked from period recipes.

When to go

May to September has all the buildings open, costumed staff, craft demonstrations and folk dance on summer Sundays. Midsummer brings the traditional bonfire evening, the museum's biggest event of the year. In winter most interiors close, but the grounds stay open and the snow-covered farms are genuinely atmospheric.

Honest expectations

It is large and it is all outdoors. Underestimating the walking is the standard mistake - the full circuit is several kilometres over sand and grass paths, and there is no way to see it properly in an hour.

Off season it becomes essentially a walk in a forest past locked doors, which is pleasant but not what the ticket suggests.

Nearby

Tallinn Zoo is on the opposite side of the bay, ten minutes by road. The old town is twenty minutes back east.