Experience the best of Pärnu

Pärnu lies where the Pärnu River meets the Gulf of Riga on Estonia's south-west coast. Its long sandy beach, backed by a park and promenade, is the centre of the Estonian summer, and the shallow water warms early. The town grew in the Middle Ages as a Hanseatic port, and the old centre keeps the Tallinn Gate, the fifteenth-century Red Tower and the baroque church of St Elizabeth.

Pärnu has been a spa resort since 1838, when its first mud baths opened, and the white functionalist Mud Baths building still stands by the shore. Wooden villas with fretwork balconies line the leafy streets behind the beach. Soomaa National Park, a landscape of bogs and floodplain where people paddle through flooded forest in spring, lies inland, and Kihnu island, with its striped folk costume, is out in the gulf.

Estonian food here is plain and good: smoked fish, dark rye bread, herring, and kama, a roasted grain flour stirred into sour milk. Beach cafés stay open late under the pale northern nights, and the town turns quiet and frosty in the dark months.