Estonia's summer capital — Baltic beach, Art Nouveau villas, and mud spas
Pärnu is Estonia's summer capital — a seaside resort city of Art Nouveau boarding-house villas, a wide white-sand beach on the Baltic, and a tradition of mud-bath spa treatments that dates to the 1830s. In summer the population triples as Estonians and Latvians descend for what is effectively the Baltics' equivalent of a Riviera — promenade cafes, outdoor concerts, beach volleyball, and the gentle northern European sun that never fully sets in June. Out of season, the old town of pastel stucco houses and the Pärnu Museum (covering the Bronze Age settlements found in the surrounding marshes) a…
Pärnu's strategic position on the Gulf of Riga made it a Hanseatic League member from 1318 and a Swedish and Russian administrative centre in turn. The mud bath tradition began in 1838 when Dr. Carl Abraham Hunnius set up the first bath establishment using the sulphurous therapeutic mud found in the Pärnu River estuary — the Estonian king of the era endorsed it, and Baltic aristocrats began arriving. The resort culture flourished under the Russian Empire (when the tsarist court's fashion for Baltic summer holidays drove development) and the independent Estonian Republic (1918–1940), leaving b…