Tallinn, Estland

Tallinn rewards visitors who arrive without expectation and leave astonished. The Old Town (Vanalinn) is not a reconstructed heritage district but a living city that simply survived: its medieval fabric — limestone walls, cobbled lanes, Gothic merchant houses — was never bombed, never burned in the fires that destroyed so many northern European city centres, and barely touched during Soviet occupation when Tallinn's cultural distinctiveness was both suppressed and, in its architecture, inadvertently preserved. Today the Old Town is divided between the Lower Town (the merchant quarter, with the Town Hall Square, guild halls, and the ancient Raeapteek pharmacy) and the Upper Town (Toompea, the fortress hill with the parliament, churches, and viewing platforms over the rooftops). Walking between the two takes about ten minutes; exploring them properly takes two or three days. Beyond the Old Town, Tallinn has excellent contemporary museums — the Kumu Art Museum (Estonia's national art collection, housed in a remarkable 2006 building in the Kadriorg park), the Estonian Open Air Museum (relocated 18th–19th century farmsteads in a forest setting), and the Lennusadam Seaplane Harbour (a dramatic 1917 reinforced-concrete hangar, now a maritime museum). The Kadriorg neighbourhood, built around a Baroque palace commissioned by Peter the Great in 1718, is one of the most elegant residential areas in any Baltic city.