Pärnu Beach

Pärnu is on the Estonian coast of the Gulf of Riga, two hours south of Tallinn. The beach is two kilometres of pale sand on a bay so shallow that the water stays waist-deep for a very long way out.

It has been a cure town since 1838, when the first mud baths opened. Baltic sea mud — sapropel, formed in the shallow gulf — was prescribed for rheumatic conditions across the Russian Empire and then across the Soviet Union, and the sanatoria built for that trade still operate as spas. Estonia's spa industry is disproportionately large for the country's size and this is its centre.

The gulf's shallowness has a consequence beyond wading: it warms. Summer water here reaches the low twenties, which is exceptional for the Baltic and is why the beach fills through July and August with Estonians and Finns. It also freezes, and people walk out onto it in February. The beach house of 1939 is a functionalist building and a protected monument, and the promenade in front of it was laid out when the town was still receiving patients by steamer from Saint Petersburg.

The beach is well equipped in a northern European way — a long promenade, a wooden beach house from 1939, changing rooms, volleyball, and one of the better accessible bathing setups in the region, with matting and assistance. The dunes and pine behind are protected. The town also holds Estonia's oldest continuously operating theatre and a summer festival season that fills the same hotels the cure once did.

Waist-deep for a hundred metres and low twenties in July, which for the Baltic is remarkable. Pärnu has been curing people with sea mud since 1838 and still does; the sanatoria are working spas rather than heritage. Come in the eight weeks when the water is warm, or in February when the bay freezes and people walk out onto it.