With its jutting coastline, archipelago of islands and hinterland of thick forest and bogs, Western Estonia offers a mosaic of the features that make Estonia so special. Many locals maintain that it is in this region’s juniper-covered heaths, quaint country towns and wave-battered shores watched over by solitary lighthouses, that the true soul of the nation ultimately lies.

Wildlife

It’s an area that boasts a rich variety of wildlife, including sizeable communities of deer, moose, elk and beaver, as well as thousands of migrating birds in the spring and autumn.

Tourism

Although many of the coastal towns have been resorts since the nineteenth century, when the cream of the Baltic aristocracy came here to bathe their weary limbs in medicinal seaside mud, much of western Estonia was considered a sensitive border area during the Soviet occupation, and tourism didn’t really get going again until the 1990s.

Happily, the desire to develop western Estonia as a tourist destination has been tempered by a desire to protect and nurture its landscapes and wildlife.