Lääne-Viru

Palmse Manor, the most fully restored of Lahemaa's estate houses, was the seat of the von der Pahlen family for generations and today presents a complete 18th-century Baltic German manor experience: the main house, a distillery, a coach house and formal gardens all restored and open to visitors, giving a concrete sense of the wealth and lifestyle this aristocratic class maintained in rural Estonia. Sagadi Manor, smaller and quieter, houses a forestry museum reflecting the estate's historical role in managing Lahemaa's woodlands, while Vihula Manor has been converted into a hotel and spa complex, letting visitors actually stay within a restored historic estate rather than only touring it. Together, the three manors represent different approaches to preserving the same architectural heritage — museum, working forestry history, and functioning hospitality.

Käsmu, sometimes called the “Captains' Village” for the disproportionate number of sea captains it produced during the 19th and early 20th centuries, preserves a coastal maritime culture entirely distinct from the manor houses' aristocratic history — modest wooden fishermen's houses, a small maritime museum, and a coastal boulder field walk make it a genuinely different texture of Lahemaa's story. Altja, a smaller fishing village nearby, is known for its traditional swing (a large wooden village swing historically used for community gatherings) and a cluster of well-preserved net sheds along the shore, offering a still more modest, working-village counterpoint to the manors' formal grandeur.

Beyond the manors and villages, Lahemaa's bog landscapes — reached via wooden boardwalk trails that let visitors cross terrain otherwise impassable on foot — represent a genuinely different ecosystem again: acidic, nutrient-poor wetland built up over thousands of years of slow peat accumulation, supporting specialised plant life found in few other habitats. The park's rocky coastline, particularly around the Käsmu and Vergi peninsulas, alternates between low cliffs and boulder-strewn beaches shaped by the retreat of glacial ice, giving Lahemaa a genuinely varied landscape within a single, relatively compact protected area.