Kalamaja: wooden houses, a seafront and the neighbourhood Tallinn moved to

Kalamaja is where Tallinn actually lives, and it is a ten-minute walk from the Old Town that almost no visitor makes.

The architecture is the first thing: streets of wooden houses, most of them a century old, painted in colours that survive the winter better than they sound. It is a protected district and a residential one, which means walking through it feels like walking through a neighbourhood rather than an attraction, because that is what it is.

The seafront is the second. The waterfront from the Seaplane Harbour round to Noblessner has been reclaimed over the past decade from industrial land, and the promenade now runs most of the way. The Seaplane Harbour museum — seaplanes and a submarine in a vast concrete hangar — is the best museum in the city and one of the better maritime museums anywhere.

Noblessner at the far end is the newest piece: a former shipyard turned into apartments, restaurants and a swimming spot, and the restaurants there are among the most ambitious in Tallinn.

Between Kalamaja and Telliskivi you have the whole of contemporary Tallinn inside a twenty-minute walk, which is the argument for staying in this part of the city rather than inside the walls.

Go in summer for the seafront and in winter for the light in the streets — the wooden houses under snow are the postcard nobody prints.