The Baltic States
Latvia
The largest collection of Art Nouveau in Europe, on the edge of a great pine forest.
- Capital
- City
- Destination
- Latvia
Latvia's capital was one of the Baltic's richest ports in 1900, and it spent the money on facades — whole streets of them, with faces and peacocks and screaming stone masks. Outside Riga the country is forest, river and a long white beach, and the folk song tradition is enormous: over a million texts collected, and a festival that fills a stadium to sing them.
Getting around
Riga is compact and walkable; trains reach Jūrmala and Sigulda in under an hour and cost almost nothing. Long-distance buses beat trains for everywhere else.
When to come
June and July are the point — long light, warm sea at Jūrmala, and the midsummer festivities that stop the country. Winter is grey and cheap, and Riga's covered market is at its best in it.
Worth knowing
- Riga's Central Market occupies five former Zeppelin hangars.
- The Latvian language is one of only two surviving Baltic languages, and older in structure than most of Europe's.
- Forest covers more than half the country and mushrooming in autumn is a national activity.
At the table
- Rye bread, and rye bread ice cream, which works
- Grey peas with bacon, the national dish and unapologetically heavy
- Smoked fish from the Kurzeme coast, bought at the roadside
Travel regions
2 editorial regions, each opening onto its cities.
Popular destinations
The destinations we have written most about, which is not the same as the ones most people go to — and is the only ranking we can honestly compute.
Riga
A hanseatic old town wrapped in a boulevard ring, wrapped in the best Art Nouveau streets in Europe.
Sigulda
Three castles above a sandstone river gorge, an hour from Riga by train.
Liepāja
A wind-blown port with a derelict tsarist naval town at its northern end and a rock music habit.
Kuldīga
A wooden town on Europe's widest waterfall, which is only two metres high but 249 metres across.
Experiences here
A sample of what is listed across Latvia.
Journeys through Latvia
The Journey Planner holds all 4 of these destinations and the real distances between them. It opens on 5 days, which is the shortest stay this atlas records for each of them added up — change the length, the month, the budget or the pace and build it again.
Fixed points in the year
The record
What we hold about Latvia, where each figure came from, and when it was last checked. The score says what this country is for, not how good it is — it is useful once you are already interested and is not a reason to be.
- Capital
- Riga
- Currency
- EUR — euro
- Languages
- Latvian
- Population
- 1,912,789 (2019) — Natural Earth 1:50m admin 0 countries
- ISO codes
- LV · LVA
- Time zone
- EET/EEST (UTC+2/+3)
- Membership
- European Union, Schengen area, Uses the euro, European Economic Area
- Typical day
- €50–120 per person
- Best months
- June, July, August
- Quieter months
- May, September
- Facts checked
- not verified why this matters
Europe Experience Score
How this is calculated — derived from our own tagging, not from measurement. It says what a place is for, not how good it is. The tick on each bar is the median across the whole Atlas, so a bar short of it is a dimension this place is not for.