Rummu Quarry

Rummu is a flooded limestone quarry in northwestern Estonia, and it looks like nowhere else in the Baltic: a lake of startlingly clear turquoise water, half-drowned buildings rising out of it, and beside it a great pale hill of quarry waste that rain has sculpted into gullies and ridges. The stone taken here was Vasalemma marble, a local limestone whose texture and grain resemble true marble.

The quarry's history is darker than its colours. Through the Soviet period and into the 1990s the digging was done as forced labour by inmates of the nearby Murru and Rummu prisons, who cut and processed the limestone. When the pumps that kept the pit dry were switched off, groundwater rose quickly and swallowed the lower part of the works — utility buildings and machinery — creating the lake that exists today.

The result is a strange, beautiful landscape of recent industrial ruin. On calm days divers and swimmers have explored the submerged walls, although the water hides broken concrete, rebar and barbed wire, and accidents have occurred there. The spoil heap next to the lake, eroded into a miniature badland, gives the best overview of the drowned buildings and the colour of the water. The land is privately owned.

Getting there

Rummu lies in Lääne-Harju Parish, about 34 km from the western districts of Tallinn and roughly 42 km from Tallinn Airport (TLL). The quarry lies by the village of Rummu in the Vasalemma area.