Soomaa

Soomaa National Park was established in 1993 in south-western Estonia and protects some 398 km² of raised bogs, forests and floodplains. Its name means literally land of the bogs.

Its most singular feature is hydrological and seasonal. Each spring, and sometimes in autumn too, the thaw and the rains cause the five rivers that cross the park to overflow simultaneously and flood woods, meadows, roads and the yards of houses under several metres of water. The people of the district call that period the fifth season, and for the weeks it lasts the landscape is travelled by boat: it is possible to paddle between the trees of the flooded forest.

That dynamic has shaped a culture of its own. Soomaa preserves the tradition of the haabjas, a dugout canoe hollowed from a single aspen trunk, whose building technique is inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. The park's raised bogs, with their pools and ridges, are crossed by boardwalks, and the wildlife includes elk, beaver, lynx, wolf and an abundant wetland and forest birdlife.