Red roofs and pastel merchants' houses
Tallinn
A walled medieval town on the Baltic with cone-roofed towers, red tiles and soft-coloured house fronts.
Why Tallinn is roof tile red
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has one of the best-preserved medieval town centres in northern Europe. It was a member of the Hanseatic League, the trading network of the Baltic and North Sea. The lower town is still ringed by much of its wall, built of local grey limestone, with round towers capped by red cones. Inside, merchants' houses with steep gables are painted in gentle pastels: yellow, pink, pale green and cream. From the viewing platforms on Toompea hill the town is a spread of red tiled roofs with green copper spires rising through them, and the sea beyond. The old town has been a World Heritage Site since 1997.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Tallinn" on Wikipedia. If you know Tallinn and we have it wrong, tell us.
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The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Shekhawati In: Digrajsingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kutch In: Zeel Satyendra Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kanchipuram In: Ssriram mt, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Auroville In: Kaspar Konrad, Public domain, source
- Fatehpur Sikri In: HibaSiddiqui, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Delhi In: A.Savin, FAL, source