Start from 30 curated places around Tallinn, EE, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Rataskaevu 16
The Old Town's most beloved sit-down restaurant, doing hearty modern takes on Estonian home cooking in a warren of rooms behind the Wishing Well lane. The elk roast and the warm chocolate cake have near-cult status, and the house pumpkin bread with seasoned butter lands before you order. It books out nightly, so this is one to plan around.
Leib Resto ja Aed
A Nordic kitchen named for the dark rye bread it bakes in house, set in a walled garden against the Old Town ramparts. The cooking is clean and seasonal, built on Estonian farm produce and herbs from the garden you are sitting in. The courtyard tables in summer are among the nicest in the city.
Trails & outdoors
Kadriorg Park
The wooded former palace park east of the centre, laced with shaded gravel paths, an ornamental pond and formal gardens. It is the city's favourite easy walk, flat and pram-friendly, threading past museums and the swan pond. A loop here is the gentlest way to spend a morning outdoors in town.
Pirita rand
The long sandy beach and pine-backed promenade on the bay north-east of the city, with a flat seafront path that runs for kilometres past the marina and convent ruins. It is where Tallinners come to walk, run and swim in summer, with the Old Town skyline across the water. Easy, scenic and largely level.
Things to do
Kumu Art Museum
The flagship of the Estonian national art collection, a striking copper-and-glass building cut into the Kadriorg hillside, holding two centuries of Estonian art including the strange, strong work made under Soviet occupation. It is the best single museum in the Baltics and an easy half day. Architecture and collection are equally the point.
Lennusadam
A maritime museum set in a vast 1910s seaplane hangar on the Kalamaja waterfront, with a real submarine you can climb inside and aircraft hung from the concrete domes overhead. It is hands-on and genuinely impressive in scale, the rare museum that works equally for kids and adults. Plan a couple of hours.
Landmarks & sights
Raekoja plats
The medieval market square at the heart of the Old Town, anchored by the only surviving Gothic town hall in northern Europe. It has been the city's living room for seven centuries, ringed by merchants' houses and a working apothecary that has traded on the same corner since the early 1400s. Go for the scale of the square, then duck into the lanes off it.
St. Olaf's Church
A soaring Gothic church in the lower Old Town whose spire was, by legend, once the tallest building in the world. The draw is the narrow stone staircase up the tower, which spits you out on an exposed walkway with the best unbroken view over the medieval roofs to the harbour. The climb is tight and not for the claustrophobic.