Lahemaa Coastal Road

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Tallinn

   Tallinn is a medieval city that kept its walls, and the thick stone towers and steep red roofs of its old town make it among the best-preserved in northern Europe. It grew rich as a Hanseatic port, trading with Novgorod and Lübeck, and the merchants' houses and guildhalls built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries still line the cobbled lanes. Above it all stands Toompea, the hill of the castle and the parliament, with the onion domes of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, built in the 1890s when Estonia was part of the Russian Empire, still dominating the view.

   Read the complete Tallinn write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Tallinn is where the day begins. Next is Kolga.

2. 2. Kolga

   Kolga Bay is shallow and full of boulders, which is how the whole Lahemaa coast looks if you ignore the trees. The name Lahemaa means the Land of Bays, and in 1971 this was declared the first national park in the Soviet Union, a minor miracle in an era that did not care much about protecting land from factories. It covers about seven hundred square kilometres of low coast, with pine forest, bogs, limestone cliffs, fishing villages and old manors strung together along a series of long, flat peninsulas that point out into the Gulf of Finland.

   Read the complete Kolga write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Kolga comes up about 60 km into the recorded legs. Next is Vosu.

3. 3. Võsu

   Võsu is a seaside village in Lahemaa National Park where a long sandy beach, a pine forest and a few wooden villas make up the best of the Estonian summer. The beach is broad and shallow, the water warms up slowly, and in July the place fills with families from Tallinn and Tartu, who come to spend a week or two in their summer houses or in guesthouses along the shore. Reed beds line the nearby river mouth, and the sunsets over the Gulf of Finland are long and gentle.

   Read the complete Vosu write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 85 km into the recorded legs you reach Vosu. Next is Kasmu.

4. 4. Käsmu

   Käsmu is known as the Captains' Village, and it has the proportions of a place that produced a lot of sailors for a small population. In the nineteenth century, this tiny settlement on a peninsula in Lahemaa trained and sent out so many ship's captains and mariners that a maritime school was founded here, and the old captains' houses still stand in neat rows along the shore, with tall roofs and carved porches. Today the village has fewer than a hundred permanent residents, and the old school building is part of the maritime museum, which tells the story of the village and its sailors.

   Read the complete Kasmu write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Kasmu, late in the day. Next is Palmse.

5. 5. Palmse

   Palmse is a manor, not a village, and the estate is the reason people come. The Palmse Manor was the seat of the von der Pahlen family, Baltic German nobles who held it from the late seventeenth century until the Estonian land reform of 1919, and the main house, a long, pale baroque building with a red roof, was built in the eighteenth century. The grounds include a park, a pond with a bridge, a distillery now turned into a pub, and a string of outbuildings that give the estate its sense of being a small working world. It stands in the heart of Lahemaa National Park, in northern Estonia, forty or so kilometres from the Gulf of Finland's coast.

   Read the complete Palmse write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Finish at Palmse. That is the ride.