Shaped in the Middle Ages, the space of Tallinn's old town has a very unusual architectural layout for a Hanseatic port town. The town (formerly Rewal) did not have a typical long quay and perpendicular streets that acted as a market place. The layout of the urban space was divided into the so-called upper town (with the cathedral and castle) and the lower town with the main market square. The whole was surrounded by city walls, more than 2,300 metres long, reinforced by dozens of towers (26 of which survive to this day). An important element of the development of the lower town was a powerful Dominican monastery situated in the vicinity of the market square, about halfway along the eastern wall of the town walls. The Revival monastery, together with the church of St Catherine of Alexandria, was founded before the middle of the 13th century, in 1246, as the second Dominican centre in the territory of Inflants. At the time of the victory of the Reformation in Rewal (1524 - 1525), the monastery was closed and the monks were expelled from the town, the monastery church of St. Katharina burned down a few years later. After World War I, the remains of the monastery complex were made accessible to tourists. Between 1954 and 1968, extensive archaeological work was carried out on the monastery grounds and a partial reconstruction of the building was carried out, followed by the opening of a museum in the form of a lapidarium. The northern wing of the former convent, the so-called New Refectory, was converted into a Catholic church in the 19th century, now the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

The ruins of the Dominican monastery in Rewal are one of the best-preserved monastery complexes in the whole of Livonia. The grounds of the former monastery are partly under the administration of the city authorities and, as buildings adjacent to the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, are owned by the Roman Catholic parish. The latter is accessible from the porch of the cathedral church (via a corridor to the right of the entrance). Here you can see a fragment of the well-preserved monastery cloisters surrounding the former cloister (in the west wing and partly in the south wing). Architectural artefacts from the monastery's sculptural decorations are also on display here. On the side of Müürivahe Tänav Street, in one of the courtyards, one can visit an exhibition of the Dominican museum and the art gallery located in the basement; next door, there is a contemporary chapel of the Dominican order, which has resumed its activities in Tallinn for several years. A few metres further down a transverse narrow street is the so-called St Catherine's Passage, considered to be one of the oldest surviving relics of medieval Rewal. On the side wall of the passage (the former outer wall of the church), stone tombstones (dating from the 14th to 15th century) commemorating members of the magistrate, the Grand Guild and the Blackhead Brotherhood are exposed. The same road leads to the ruins of St Catherine's monastery church. After the above-mentioned fire in the early 1630s and subsequent collapses of the unprotected remains of the structure (the largest in the 19th century), only the foundations, the partially vaulted crypt under the choir, the two entrance portals, the lower zone of the west and south walls and the partially north wall, the lower part of the tower and part of the apse walls have survived from the monastery building in their entirety. The most impressive feature is the western portal of the temple, where sculptural decoration has been preserved depicting dragons carrying snakes in their mouths, interpreted as identifying the Dominican Order with the spread of education and faith.