Soomaa National Park is one of Estonia's great natural treasures and one of the most unusual corners of the Baltics: a vast 'land of bogs' made up of raised bogs, floodplain forests and rivers winding between alders and willows, in the south-west of the country. Created in 1993 and protected as a Ramsar wetland and Natura 2000 site, it's a primeval, silent and wild landscape where water rules and nature follows its own rhythm.
Soomaa is famous above all for its 'fifth season': every year, when snowmelt and late-winter and spring rains make the rivers overflow, the water floods the forests and meadows and turns the park into an aquatic world where the only way to get around is by canoe. Paddling between the trunks of a flooded forest, in absolute silence broken only by birdsong, is one of the most magical nature experiences in Europe. The rest of the year, Soomaa is explored on foot along wooden boardwalks across the bogs, by canoe on its rivers and by bike along its roads.
This guide covers Soomaa with a practical eye: how to get there (by car or on a day trip from Pärnu, Viljandi or Tartu), what to see and do (the Riisa and Kuresoo bogs, canoe trips, beaver and elk watching, the Tõramaa visitor centre), when to go depending on what you're looking for (the 'fifth season' in spring, summer for hiking and paddling) and how to make the most of this very special park. An ideal destination for anyone looking for pure nature, silence and one of the most original paddling experiences on the continent.
Soomaa's bogs began forming some 10,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age, when the shallow lakes left by the ice gradually filled with sphagnum moss until they became today's great raised bogs, which grow barely a millimetre a year. For centuries, local people learned to live with the floods: they developed the tradition of the dugout canoe (haabjas), carved from a hollowed-out aspen trunk, to get around the flooded forests during the 'fifth season'. This water culture, together with hunting, fishing and berry picking on the bogs, shaped life in a land always at the mercy of the water cycle. The national park was created in 1993 to protect this unique landscape of bogs, floodplain forests and rivers, one of the largest in Europe. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heartland where the Estonian soul was born: the university city of Tartu, Hanseatic Viljandi, Otepää as the birthplace of the flag, and the bogs of Soomaa.
Read the history of The south: Tartu and Viljandi →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 14 activities in Tallin. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Soomaa, you have to go back to the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. When the great ice sheet that covered northern Europe retreated, it left behind a low, flat, poorly drained plain in the southwest of what is now Estonia, dotted with shallow lakes and waterlogged hollows. In that soggy landscape, sphagnum moss began to grow, year after year.
Sphagnum has an extraordinary quality: it holds huge amounts of water and, when it dies, it never fully decomposes, because of the lack of oxygen and the acidity of the water. Its remains build up as peat, layer upon layer, at a very slow rate of roughly one millimetre a year. Over thousands of years, that build-up raised the great raised bogs (rabas) that define Soomaa today: cushions of moss several metres thick, so high in the middle that they are fed only by rain and not by groundwater, with their own small-scale landscape of dark pools, hummocks and dwarf pines.
This process turned Soomaa, whose name literally means 'land of bogs' in Estonian, into one of Europe's largest complexes of peat bogs, floodplain forests and winding rivers. Bogs such as Kuresoo, Öördi, Valgeraba and Kikepera are living witnesses to a geological story that is still unfolding: every year the moss grows its millimetre and stores vast amounts of carbon underground. It is, in the most literal sense, a landscape that is still building itself.
What made Soomaa famous around the world is its 'fifth season' (viies aastaaeg): the great floods that add a fifth season of their own to the region's calendar, on top of spring, summer, autumn and winter. Every year, when the late-winter thaw and spring rains (typically between late March and April) swell the Raudna, Halliste, Navesti and Lemmjõgi rivers, the water bursts its banks and floods forests, meadows, roads and even farmyards. The park becomes a vast water world where, for days or weeks, the only way to get around is by canoe.
The scale of the flooding varies enormously from year to year. In big flood years the water level can rise by several metres and cover thousands of hectares; in other years the flood is modest or barely comes at all. No two 'fifth seasons' are alike, and none is guaranteed: it is a purely natural phenomenon that depends on each winter's weather.
For local people, this cycle was never a disaster but an expected part of life. For centuries they planned their work, homes and journeys around the water: they built their houses on small rises, stored hay in raised barns and, above all, developed a boat made to measure for the flooded forest. The 'fifth season' was not a break in everyday life: it was just another season, with its own rules and its own way of getting around.
That age-old life alongside the water gave rise to one of Estonia's most unusual cultural treasures: the haabjas, a dugout canoe made by hollowing out a single aspen trunk (haab, in Estonian). In a land under water for much of the year, this light, stable and silent boat was for centuries the essential means of transport for the people of Soomaa: they used it to go to church, take livestock to graze on higher ground, carry hay, fish, hunt and visit the neighbours when the roads disappeared under water.
The building technique is refined knowledge handed down from generation to generation. A thick, healthy aspen is chosen, the trunk is hollowed out, and then, in the trickiest step, the boat is widened using heat and water, spreading the wood until it takes its final shape. Every haabjas is one of a kind, the result of an expert reading of the wood and the surroundings.
With the arrival of roads, bridges and factory-made boats, the tradition nearly died out in the 20th century. But a handful of craftspeople and local guides kept it alive, and in 2021 UNESCO inscribed the «Expression and use of the Soomaa single-log boat» on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. Today, watching a log being hollowed out or paddling a haabjas across the still water of a flooded forest takes you straight into the lives of the bogs' former inhabitants.
Floods aside, life in the 'land of bogs' was always hard and centred on getting by. Families settled on strips of solid ground and on the higher riverbanks, where they could farm and build. The floodplain meadows (luhad), naturally fertilised by the silt the floods left behind, produced excellent hay that was cut in summer and became the backbone of livestock farming: mowing these wet meadows, now partly kept up as a conservation practice, shaped the landscape and the local economy for centuries.
People rounded out their living with what the bogs and forests offered: they picked lingonberries, bilberries and cloudberries (the prized 'murakas'), hunted elk and waterfowl, fished the rivers and made use of the timber. Wooded meadows (puisniidud), like the one still preserved next to the Tõramaa visitor centre, were semi-natural habitats managed by mowing and grazing, bursting with flowers and butterflies, that combined farming with extraordinary biodiversity.
It was a culture finely tuned to its surroundings: instead of fighting the water, people learned to read it and to organise their lives around its cycles. That deep knowledge of the bog (its safe paths, its dangers and its resources) was, for generations, the key to survival in one of the wildest corners of the Baltic.
Throughout the 20th century, much of Estonia's peatland was drained for farming, forestry and peat extraction, peat being a fuel and horticultural resource heavily exploited in the Baltic. That push threatened to change the country's great wetlands forever. The realisation that the bogs of the southwest formed an exceptional whole, among the largest and best preserved in Europe, led to calls for their protection in the last decades of the century.
Soomaa National Park was officially created in 1993, in the early years of Estonia's newly regained independence from the Soviet Union, to protect some 39,000 hectares of raised bogs, floodplain forests, wet meadows and meandering rivers. Shortly afterwards, the wetland was recognised as a Ramsar site of international importance and included in the European Natura 2000 network, cementing its status as one of the most valuable natural landscapes on the continent.
Today the park, managed by the State Forest Management Centre (RMK), combines strict protection of its ecosystems with careful nature tourism: wooden boardwalks that cross the bogs without harming them, guided canoe trips, beaver and birdwatching, and the revival of traditions such as the haabjas. Soomaa has become a symbol of wild, quiet Estonia, a place where the water still sets the pace and where travellers can glimpse an almost untouched landscape and a culture that learned, long ago, to live with the bog rather than against it.
