Estonia Discovery Guide

Estonia puts a medieval city that has kept its entire structure, a national park of raised bogs older than the pyramids, and a chain of quiet islands within two hours of one another. It is a country of 1.4 million people that most of Europe still overlooks. Old Tallinn, World Heritage since 1997, is the reason people come; Lahemaa's boardwalks over the Viru bog, Saaremaa's 2,673 square kilometres reached by a €4.30 ferry, and Tartu's university streets are the reason they come back.

The main travel issue

The weather -- January nights can reach minus 35 -- and Tallinn's summer cruise crowd, which arrives by the shipload from Helsinki.

The solution

Give the old town its early mornings and late evenings, spend the middle of the day in the forest or on the water, and come in the shoulder months, when the bogs are red and the light is long.

If you travel slowly

Take the ferry from Virtsu to Muhu and drive the causeway onto Saaremaa: 2,673 square kilometres, 31,435 people, a castle at Kuressaare, the Kaali meteorite crater and a coast of juniper and windmills. Ninety-five per cent of domestic tourists come back to it, which tells you what Estonians think of the place. Hiiumaa, the second island, is quieter still.

If you want to see the essentials

Old Tallinn -- 113 hectares of walled medieval and Hanseatic town, wholly preserved -- and then Lahemaa National Park an hour east: the first national park declared in the former Soviet Union, the largest in Estonia at 747 square kilometres, with raised bogs like the 7,000-year-old Laukasoo crossed on boardwalks, and the manor houses of the Baltic German centuries.

If you seek local character

Go to a sauna and a song festival. The sauna is named alongside the language as the country's indigenous inheritance; the Song Festival, first held in Tartu in 1869 and in Tallinn since 1896, is a UNESCO Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage and, in September 1988, the gathering of 300,000 people -- more than a quarter of all Estonians -- that gave the Singing Revolution its name.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

Soomaa, the land of bogs, protects 390 square kilometres of raised bog, flood-plain meadow and meandering river in the centre of the country, a Ramsar wetland since 1997; Tartu, with 97,304 people and the old university, is the intellectual capital; Pärnu is where Estonians spend the summer.

Estonians describe themselves through their language, which is Finnic and Uralic rather than Baltic or Slavic -- about 1.1 million native speakers, 922,000 of them in Estonia -- through the sauna, and through the song festival that has gathered the nation every few years since 1869. The country is Nordic in habit and reticence, and it says so; it is also one of the least religious in the world, with 75.7 per cent claiming no religion in the survey the encyclopaedia cites, in a country that was 80 per cent Lutheran before the war.

The war and what followed are the frame of everything. Independence was declared in February 1918 and recognised by Soviet Russia in perpetuity in February 1920; it lasted twenty years. The Soviet occupation of June 1940 brought the deportation of around 11,000 people on 14 June 1941; the German occupation followed in 1941 and the Soviet reoccupation in 1944; in March 1949, 20,722 people, 2.5 per cent of the population, were deported to Siberia. The de jure state survived in exile and in the memory of a people who restored it on 20 August 1991 after three years of singing at it.

The digital state is the newest self-image: e-government, online voting, and in 2014 the first electronic residency offered to foreigners anywhere. It sits easily beside the bogs and the sauna in a country that has always had to be small, clever and its own.

Estonia is one of Europe's least densely populated countries, and its rules for the countryside assume a visitor who behaves as if it were still empty. The State Forest Management Centre's rules of conduct are the guide: the freedom to roam is limited in protected areas, where the area's own protection rules apply; prefer existing trails, campsites and campfire sites so as not to burden the land further; take the forest fire risk seriously, and check it on the state information line 1247 before lighting anything; stay on the trail, especially in the bogs, where a boardwalk exists because the ground will not carry you and the moss will not recover from you.

The bogs are the point. Raised bogs like Laukasoo in Lahemaa are 7,000 years old and grow by millimetres; Soomaa's 390 square kilometres are a Ramsar wetland and an Important Bird Area. Walk them on the boards, in the early morning, without music.

In Tallinn the pressure is the port: more than 10 million passengers a year through one of Northern Europe's busiest harbours, most of them on the Helsinki ferries and many of them for a day in the 113 hectares of the old town. Stay a night or three rather than sailing in for the afternoon, and give the money to the city rather than the ship.

January–February -- the coldest months, with nights that can reach minus 35, snow on the old town and the bogs frozen for walking; short days, long dark, and Tallinn's cafés at their most Nordic.

March–April -- the changeable months: snow in early April and days above 20 degrees later the same month. The ice goes out of the bog pools and the birds return to Soomaa.

May–June -- the first warm spells, 20 to 30 degrees on the best days, the white nights lengthening toward midsummer, and the country at its greenest before the crowds. The best window.

July–August -- mild summers, warmer inland and in the south-east, cooler on the islands; the Helsinki ferries and the cruise ships fill Old Tallinn by midday; Pärnu's beaches fill with Estonians. The heaviest rain of the year falls in late summer.

September–October -- the bogs turn red and gold, the boardwalks empty, and the first snow arrives in late October or November. Saaremaa and Lahemaa are at their best.

November–December -- dark, wet, then white; Tallinn's Christmas market on the Town Hall square is the reason to come, and the sauna the reason to stay.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average

Higher — Old Tallinn in summer and December, Pärnu in July and August

Average — Tartu, Saaremaa, the rest of Tallinn

Lower — the south-east, Hiiumaa, everywhere from October to April

Ferry fares checked against TS Laevad's price list; the relative bands are editorial judgment and change with the season.