Straddling a thumb-shaped strip of land pointing out into the Baltic Sea, Haapsalu is an appealing mix of traditional seaside resort and modern spa town. Surrounded on three sides by water, it has been optimistically dubbed the “Nordic Venice”. This requires a significant degree of imagination, but Haapsalu has buckets of charm, with narrow, winding streets of haphazard wooden fisherfolk’s cottages, stately Neo-Gothic villas gazing proudly out to sea, and an imposing thirteenth-century castle.

History

The town has been popular with holidaymakers since the early nineteenth-century, when local doctor Carl Abraham Hunnius (1797-1851) began to publicize the curative properties of the local mud. Haapsalu soon became a magnet for St Petersburg high society - both Tsar Alexander II and his son Alexander III were regular visitors. The composer Tchaikovsky was on holiday here in 1867. By the mid-twentieth century, it was a mass market bucket-and-spade resort, although tourism was subsequently wound down by the security-conscious Soviet regime, which turned northwestern Estonia into one vast military installation. Since independence, Haapsalu has become enormously popular both as beach resort and health spa, and many of the hotels offer the mud treatments that initially made the town famous.

Around town