The Baltic States
Lithuania
A baroque capital, a sand spit shared with Russia, and a hill of a hundred thousand crosses.
- Capital
- City
- Destination
- Lithuania
Lithuania was once the largest state in Europe, and the memory of it sits oddly on a country of under three million. Vilnius has the biggest baroque old town in the region, full of courtyards you walk into by accident. The Curonian Spit is a 98-kilometre dune of shifting sand, and the Hill of Crosses is one of the strangest and most moving places on the continent.
Getting around
Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipėda are linked by frequent buses; the coast needs a ferry from Klaipėda to the spit. The old town is entirely walkable and mostly cobbled.
When to come
Summer for the coast and the long evenings. September is warm, cheap and empty. Vilnius is at its best in the first week of March, when the Kaziukas craft fair takes over the old town.
Worth knowing
- The Hill of Crosses is an active devotional site, not a photo opportunity — leave one or leave it alone.
- Užupis, in Vilnius, declared itself a republic in 1997 and has a constitution on a wall in twenty languages.
- The Curonian Spit is shared with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad; the border is real and closed to casual crossing.
At the table
- Cepelinai: potato dumplings the size and shape of a zeppelin
- Cold beetroot soup, shocking pink, served with a hot potato
- Dark rye bread with garlic, fried, eaten with beer
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.
Vilnius
Forty churches, endless courtyards, and a self-declared republic of artists over the river.
Nida, Curonian Spit
Wooden fishermen's houses under a moving dune, on a sand spit between lagoon and sea.
Šiauliai
An industrial town whose reason to visit stands in a field twelve kilometres north.
Trakai
A red brick island castle in a lake, and the Karaim community that has lived beside it since the 14th century.
Experiences here
A sample of what is listed across Lithuania.
The courtyards nobody signposts
The old town's real geography is behind the street doors; push the unlocked ones and keep going.
Read the Užupis constitution
Forty-one articles on mirrored plaques, including a dog's right to be a dog and everyone's right to be happy — and not to be.
The grey dunes at first light
Sand that buried four villages in the 19th century; the boardwalk exists because walking on it directly would start it moving again.
The Hill of Crosses
Not a monument — an act repeated by hundreds of thousands of people, most of them anonymous, over two centuries.
Journeys through Lithuania
The Journey Planner holds all 4 of these destinations and the real distances between them. It opens on 6 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 Lithuania, 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
- Vilnius
- Currency
- EUR — euro
- Languages
- Lithuanian
- Population
- 2,786,844 (2019) — Natural Earth 1:50m admin 0 countries
- ISO codes
- LT · LTU
- 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.