The Estonian Open Air Museum (Eesti Vabaohumuuseum) is the principal ethnographic museum of Estonia and one of the largest open-air museums of vernacular architecture in northern Europe, occupying a seventy-two-hectare wooded coastal park at Rocca al Mare on the western edge of the Estonian capital, around eight kilometres from the historic centre of Tallinn. The museum was founded in 1957 and presents a comprehensive sample of the traditional rural architecture and material culture of the Estonian countryside before the major rural depopulation of the twentieth century. The collection comprises around eighty original rural buildings transported piece by piece from their original locations across all four corners of Estonia and reassembled at Rocca al Mare in geographically coherent farmstead groupings. Each principal Estonian rural cultural-historical region is represented - the islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, the northern coastal lowlands, the eastern Setomaa borderland with its Orthodox Russian-influenced culture, the south Estonian forest belt, and the central Estonian agricultural plain - with whole farmhouses, threshing barns, smoke saunas, fishing huts and a small wooden parish church transported from their original sites. The buildings represent a chronological range from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, with the most outstanding individual structures including the 1699 Sutlepa Chapel from the small Estonian Swedish village of Sutlepa on the western coast, the smoke-saunas of southern Tartumaa, the 1888 Lau windmill from Saaremaa and the early-nineteenth-century farmhouses of the Setomaa region. Each building is furnished internally with the appropriate period rural household objects, and a number are operated as working interpretive sites with costumed historical performers demonstrating traditional crafts including spinning, weaving, threshing, butter-churning and bread-baking. The museum is open daily from 10:00 to 20:00 from May to September and 10:00 to 17:00 from October to April. The standard admission includes access to the entire site, with all building interiors freely accessible during opening hours and additional commentary available through a downloadable mobile app in eight languages. The on-site Korstma Kolu tavern serves traditional Estonian black bread, sprat-and-egg sandwiches and the local craft beer in a reconstructed nineteenth-century rural pub interior.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Vabaohumuuseumi tee 12, Tallinn, Estonia

Website: https://evm.ee

Opening Date: 01/01/1957