Harju

Tallinn's Old Town (Vanalinn) is the centrepiece of Harju County: a UNESCO World Heritage Site with 13th-century limestone walls, the Town Hall Square (Raekoja plats, 1322), Gothic merchant houses, the Katariina käik artisan lane, and the Toompea fortress hill with the Estonian Parliament and panoramic viewpoints. Kumu Art Museum (Estonia's national art collection), Kadriorg Park and Palace, and the Lennusadam Seaplane Harbour maritime museum are major attractions in the wider city. Tallinn is connected to Helsinki by ferry (2 hours), making it one of the most accessible Baltic capitals in northern Europe.

The North Estonian Klint is a limestone escarpment running along the entire northern coast of Estonia, creating cliffs that drop directly to the Baltic in some places and form a low plateau edge in others. Near Tallinn, the Paekalda nature trail at Maardu follows the klint edge with sea views; further east, the Ontika cliff (22 metres, the highest point of the klint) in the Viru-Nigula area is the most dramatic section. Pakri Peninsula, west of Paldiski in Harju County, has a particularly photogenic klint section with lighthouse and view over the sea. The klint landscape is geologically significant — it marks the southern edge of the Fennoscandian shield and was formed by the retreat of ancient seas over 450 million years of limestone deposition.

Paldiski, 50 km west of Tallinn on the Pakri Peninsula, was a closed Soviet military city from 1944 to 1994 — no civilians were permitted entry without special clearance. The Soviets built a major naval base and nuclear submarine training facility here; the nuclear reactors were not decommissioned and removed until after Estonian independence. Today, Paldiski is an open and peaceful small town on dramatic limestone coastline, with derelict Soviet military structures, a 19th-century Russian lighthouse, and the atmospheric ruins of the submarine training facilities. It is one of the most unusual industrial-heritage destinations in the Baltic.