Latvia fits in a long weekend.
Old Town mornings in Riga, the bog boardwalks at Kemeri, Rundale’s gilded halls and the castles above the Gauja: what each tour is like, what it costs, where to book it.
Seven tours worth the money.
The morning walk half of Riga starts with, a market table of smoked fish and rye, the palace an hour south, the huskies out in the pines. Between them these cover most of what people fly in for.
Riga Old Town walking tour
Riga Old Town walking tour covers top sights in 1h45 with funny, detailed guide stories and a budget-friendly price.
From $18 per person
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★ 4.5Rainy-day pickRiga Sightseeing Tour by Canal Boat with AudioguideFrom $15118 reviews
Latvia calls this bit Switzerland.
Fifty minutes out of Riga the ground finally does something. Red sandstone cliffs, a cable car strung across the Gauja since 1969, Turaida’s brick tower over the treeline and a castle ruin you can climb before lunch. Come in the first fortnight of October and the whole gorge turns copper.
You have time for one day trip. Which one?
Most visitors get a single clear day outside the capital, and three routes take nearly all of that traffic. Palace and border run to the south, castles and gorge to the north-east, bog and beach to the west. Pick the one that sounds like your kind of morning.
Gilded and indoors
The palace run south
8 hours (approx.) · from $157 · 225 reviews
Ninety minutes down the Bauska road to Rundale, where Rastrelli built a duke a small Versailles and the rose garden still runs to the treeline. Bauska’s ruined castle on the way back, and most operators bolt on the Hill of Crosses over the Lithuanian border. The one that works in rain, which here matters.
See the palace days →
Castles and cliffs
The Gauja valley day
6 hours (approx.) · from $144 · 41 reviews
Sigulda, Turaida and Krimulda sit in a ring around the river gorge, joined by cable car and a lot of steps. Castle ruins, sandstone caves, a bobsleigh track at the bottom of the hill and a walk that earns its lunch. Best from May to the middle of October.
See the Sigulda days →
Out before dawn
The bog and the coast
7 hours (approx.) · from $235 · 61 reviews
The Great Kemeri Bog boardwalk loops past black pools and stunted pines, and it is worth the alarm: sunrise is the hour the mist sits on the water. Add the white sand and wooden villas at Jurmala and you are back in Riga by mid-afternoon.
See the Kemeri days →
Riga does not close early.
Black Balsam is the local dare: forty-five percent, bitter as a February morning, and every bar has a version it would rather you drank with blackcurrant. Cellar rooms under the Old Town, a beer bike through the parks, and crawls that start about the time the last walking tour finishes.
The Central Market is the meal.
Five German airship hangars, hauled to the riverbank in the 1930s to hold Riga’s grocers, still the largest market in Europe. Smoked eel, grey peas with bacon, curd cheese, rye that keeps a fortnight. Go with somebody who knows which stall.
Sled dogs and an Olympic track.
Latvia gets four solid months of winter and puts them to work. Husky teams run the forest tracks an hour outside Riga, and the Sigulda bobsleigh run, built for the Soviet team in 1986, still sends visitors down the corners at speed.
Riga wears every century at once.
A Hanseatic old town of guild halls and merchant houses, then eight hundred Art Nouveau buildings north of the canal, more than any other city in Europe, with stone faces glaring down from Alberta Street. Walk it with a guide and the facades start explaining themselves.
Riga, block by block.
The Old Town is twenty minutes across on foot and everything else is one tram. Alberta Street for the facades. The market sheds for lunch. The canal boat for an idle hour. The cellar bars once it gets to eleven.
Pick the shape of the day.
Twelve ways to spend one. Some run two hours and cost less than dinner. Some take the whole day, the far side of the country and a packed lunch.
Nothing here is more than two hours away.
Latvia is small and the roads are empty. Sigulda sits an hour north-east, Rundale ninety minutes south, the Kemeri boardwalks forty minutes west, and Jurmala is close enough to count as an afternoon.
How to spend seventy-two hours.
Riga first, because the Old Town explains the rest of the country. Then the valley, then the coast. This is the order that puts the least of the trip on a motorway.
Day 1
Riga on foot
Start in the Old Town while it is still quiet, take the lift up St Peter’s for the roof view, then walk north into the Art Nouveau streets. Dinner in the market sheds.
Plan day one →
Day 2
Up the Gauja
The train to Sigulda takes an hour. Turaida’s red tower, the cable car over the gorge, Gutmanis Cave and the walk down to the river. Back in Riga for a late table.
Plan day two →
Day 3
Bog, then beach
Out early for the Kemeri boardwalk while the mist is still sitting on the pools, then twenty minutes on to Jurmala for pine woods, wooden villas and a very long flat beach.
Plan day three →
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