Tallınn

Tallinn's Old Town looks built for a fairytale - limestone towers, red rooftops, turrets enough to fill a snow globe. Visitors arrive, snap the same shot from Kohtuotsa, and call it done.

But this city's gentlest chapter grew out of its harshest one. Hanseatic merchants raised these walls against invaders; five decades of Soviet occupation later, Estonians brought down an empire not with weapons but with songs, gathering by the hundreds of thousands until voice alone became a kind of border. In 1989, two million people linked hands across three countries - the Baltic Way - and a small nation sang itself free. Then it built Skype.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours climb the Patkuli Stairs to Toompea Hill, where bishops once watched over the merchants below, and linger in the Danish King's Garden, where legend says a flag fell from the sky and gave Denmark its colours. They also pass the old KGB building on Pikk Street, quieter now, but not silent.

Put your earbuds in. Tallinn would rather sing its story than tell it – so listen, and walk to the tune of it.