Now We Travel to the Areas West of Tallinn
Text Timo Raussi Photos Visit Estonia / Scottish House, Andrei Chertkov, Silja Hurskainen
In Facebook travel groups about Tallinn, questions about destinations in the capital’s surrounding areas appear more and more often. There is great interest in places that can be visited within a single day using public transport, returning to Tallinn in the evening or at night.
Because of timetables and the variety of sights, it is worth heading west. By train you can reach Keila and Paldiski, and by regional bus the direction of Keila-Joa and Laulasmaa. All four are located in the same direction, within about a 15 km radius of each other. Between them there is also a fifth destination, Kloogaranna, which can be reached both by train and bus, but where there is little besides one of the region’s most beautiful swimming beaches and its beach café. Nature lovers also hike about a kilometre from the beach to admire the stepped Treppoja waterfall.
Keila is a small town of 10,000 residents that was first mentioned in written sources in 1241, and is home to the largest medieval church in the Tallinn area. However, the railway settlement only grew into a town in 1938.
Recently Keila became the unofficial “supermarket capital of Estonia”, as on the edge of the town, along a street about one kilometre long, there are almost side by side a Selver, two Rimi stores, a Maxima, a Grossi and a Lidl—in other words, sizeable shops from nearly all of Estonia’s major grocery chains. The line-up was completed last week with the opening of the Keila Keskus shopping centre with its Coop store. The centre also has a cinema, a couple of restaurants, a gym, a sports equipment shop, a bookshop, and smaller stores.
A self-respecting travel magazine would hesitate to call them attractions, since similar ones can be found all over Estonia by the dozen. However, Keila also has a more distinctive place for shopping: a large department store called Rõõmu kaubamaja that does not belong to any chain. Visitors who have been there describe its cosmetics, clothing and home goods departments as “a place with quite a different selection of products from what you usually see in Tallinn”.
The real attractions and leisure spots in Keila include the county museum in a former manor park, a swimming hall that was once the first in Estonia to feature a water slide, a Jacuzzi and steam sauna, a sports and recreation park converted from a Soviet army tank driving training ground, craft and clothing shops, a new song stage, a couple of flea markets, a cake confectionery, and a number of restaurants and pubs such as the impressive Scottish House shown in the article’s main photo. On a field on the outskirts of the town stands an old An-12 military aircraft that now serves as a club space for model aircraft enthusiasts.
Paldiski with its lighthouses and coastal cliffs, Laulasmaa with its spas, Michelin-listed restaurants and the Arvo Pärt Centre, and Keila-Joa with its manor castle and waterfall have all been presented in “The Baltic Guide” before, both together and separately. Nor is Keila far from the impressive ruins of Padise Monastery or from Lake Rummu and the former prison, which Visit Estonia also highlights as a spectacular location for Instagram photos. In fact, the regional bus from Tallinn to Rummu conveniently passes through the centre of Keila.
Train tickets are easy to buy via the Elron website or with a bank card from the ticket machine in the train vestibule. On regional buses you can pay the driver with a bank card or with the green Ühiskaart travel card, which can be topped up for example at R-kiosks. Bus timetables and a route planner in English can be found here. When boarding the bus, tell the driver the name of the stop you are travelling to so that he can sell you the correct regional zone ticket. The recently launched joint ticket for buses and trains around Tallinn is more of a season-ticket product intended for local residents rather than occasional travellers.
To learn more about this and similar topicsattraction Harjumaa Keila Laulasmaa Paldiski restaurant Rummu Shopping Centre
