Stroomi Beach

This guide to Stroomi Beach in Tallinn starts with the man it's named for: Bengt Fromhold Strohm, an eighteenth-century Great Guild alderman who ran a roadside tavern here and never sold so much as a bucket of sand. It follows the shoreline from watering horses outside his inn to nineteen thirty-five, when the city handed the land to an unpaid volunteer society with a simple order to build something out of scrub and sand, and the architect and pavilion, dining hall and diving platform that followed. You'll hear how that resort held up over the decades that came after. Listen for it while you're standing on the sand named after a dead innkeeper's pub sign.