Gauja National Park is Latvia's great green lung and its nature destination par excellence: more than 90,000 hectares of forests, red sandstone cliffs, caves, rivers and castles following the ancient valley of the Gauja River. Founded in 1973, it is the oldest and largest national park in the country, and its landscape of wooded hills and deep river valleys has earned it the nickname 'Switzerland of Vidzeme'.
The wonderful thing about the park is that it combines nature and history like few other places: within its borders are some of Latvia's gems, such as Sigulda with its cable car and bobsleigh track, the red-brick Turaida Castle, Gūtmanis Cave (the largest grotto in the Baltics) and the medieval town of Cēsis, former capital of the Livonian Order. All of it woven together by trails, viewpoints and rivers to canoe down.
This guide covers Gauja National Park with a practical eye: what to see and which trails to do, where the caves and sandstone cliffs are, how to get there from Riga and move between its gateways, when to come for the autumn colours or cross-country skiing, and how to plan a nature and adventure getaway just a stone's throw from the capital. It is Latvia's wild heart, green in summer and ablaze in autumn.
The Gauja River valley formed over thousands of years: the water gradually carved into red sandstone laid down 350-370 million years ago, in the Devonian period, creating the deep valley, cliffs and caves that define the landscape today. Inhabited since ancient times by Livonians and Latgalians, in the 13th century the valley was the setting for the Baltic Crusade and the building of the castles of Sigulda, Turaida, Krimulda and Cēsis. In the 19th century, with the arrival of the railway, it became a fashionable tourist and romantic destination, the 'Switzerland of Vidzeme'. In 1973 Gauja National Park was created, the first in Latvia, to protect this unique combination of nature and history. We tell all of this, along with the story of its castles and legends, in the history pages for Sigulda, Turaida and Cēsis.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Livonia, with the Gauja valley, the castles of the Order and the medieval town of Cēsis, birthplace of the Latvian flag.
Read the history of Vidzeme: the Gauja valley →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 11 activities in Riga. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
They depart from Riga, 63 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Gauja National Park begins long before that of any castle or village: it begins at the bottom of a tropical sea, some 350 to 370 million years ago, in the Devonian period. Back then, what is now Latvia lay under warm, shallow waters, and layer upon layer of sand settled on the seabed. Over time, that sand compacted into the red, yellowish and white sandstones that give the park its unmistakable character.
Millions of years later, when the sea retreated and the ice ages shaped northern Europe, the Gauja River began its patient work. Along its 452 kilometres — the longest river lying entirely within Latvia — the Gauja carved a deep valley into those soft sandstones, exposing cliffs dozens of metres high, opening caves and grottoes, and creating the rolling landscape of wooded hills and ravines that contrasts so sharply with the plains of the rest of the Baltic.
That contrast is what, centuries later, would earn the area the nickname 'Switzerland of Vidzeme'. Gūtmanis Cave, the largest grotto in the Baltics, and the Ērgļu cliffs and Sietiņiezis are the visible traces of that long geological process. Before it was ever a national park, the Gauja valley was already a masterpiece of nature.
The Gauja valley has been inhabited for thousands of years. In the centuries before the crusaders arrived, its banks were the territory of two peoples: the Livonians, Finno-Ugric speakers related to the Estonians and Finns, who held the lower and middle stretches of the river; and the Latgalians, one of the ancestral Baltic peoples from whom much of the Latvian nation descends, settled further east. For both, the Gauja was the great route for travel and trade, a waterway linking the interior with the sea.
Their fortified wooden settlements crowned the hills of the valley, in places such as Turaida ('Garden of God' in the Livonian language), Sigulda and the hill of the Vends in what would become Cēsis. They lived from fishing, hunting, farming and river trade, and practised pagan religions rooted in nature, with their own gods, sacred groves and healing springs — like the one at Gūtmanis Cave, whose water tradition still considers curative today.
This world had its own balances of power, its alliances and its conflicts, but everything would change at the start of the 13th century, when armed men bearing crosses and swords began arriving by river and by road, bringing a new religion and a new — and brutal — way of organising the land.
At the start of the 13th century, the Gauja valley became one of the stages of the Baltic Crusade. From Riga, founded in 1201, the German crusaders — the Brothers of the Sword, later absorbed into the Livonian Order — and the bishops of Riga pushed forward to subdue and Christianise the Livonians and Latgalians. The conquest left its most visible mark in a string of stone and brick castles that still dot the park.
Within just a few kilometres, around present-day Sigulda, three fortresses rose facing each other across the valley: Sigulda Castle (around 1207), belonging to the Order; the imposing red-brick Turaida (begun in 1214), belonging to the Bishop of Riga; and Krimulda. Further upstream, above the settlement of the Vends, the crusaders founded Wenden Castle around 1208 — the future Cēsis — which would become the capital of the Livonian Order and one of the most important centres of power in the eastern Baltic.
Over the following centuries, the valley lived to the rhythm of those castles and of the wars that ravaged Livonia: the Livonian War of the 16th century, with the tragedy of Cēsis in 1577; Polish, Swedish and Russian rule; and episodes such as the death of Maija, the Rose of Turaida, in 1620, which tradition turned into legend. Every stone in the Gauja valley holds a piece of that turbulent history, which we tell in detail on the Sigulda, Turaida and Cēsis pages.
The Gauja valley was discovered as a tourist destination in the 19th century, thanks to Romanticism and the railway. The European fashion for nature, picturesque landscapes and medieval ruins found the perfect setting in this valley: wooded hills, red sandstone cliffs, castles perched over the ravine and a winding river. When, in the second half of the 19th century, the railway linked Riga with the interior of Vidzeme, the valley came within easy reach of the capital's residents.
That was when the nickname that still defines it was born: the 'Switzerland of Vidzeme' or 'Latvian Switzerland'. In a land of plains and forests, the deep green Gauja valley looked like a miniature piece of Alpine scenery. Sigulda and Cēsis became fashionable for day trips and summer holidays; visitors came to walk the trails, take in the viewpoints, visit Gūtmanis Cave and tour the castles. Villas, hotels and spas began to spring up across the valley.
That early tourism laid the foundations for what was to come. In the 20th century, with Latvian independence in 1918 and later during the Soviet period, the Gauja valley remained a popular destination for nature and relaxation, and awareness grew that such a unique natural and historical heritage deserved organised protection.
On 14 September 1973, in the middle of the Soviet era, Gauja National Park was created — the first in Latvia and one of the first in the entire Soviet Union. Its aim was to protect the unique combination of nature and culture in the ancient Gauja River valley: the forests, the sandstone cliffs, the caves, the wildlife, and also the rich historical heritage of castles, churches and villages. Covering more than 90,000 hectares, it is still the largest and oldest national park in the country.
Today the park spans a territory that combines protected landscapes and lively towns — Sigulda, Turaida, Krimulda, Līgatne, Cēsis, Valmiera — with strict nature reserve zones, waymarked trails, viewpoints and a full range of active and cultural tourism. It is home to hundreds of plant and animal species, some of them rare or protected, and its management seeks to balance conservation with visitors' enjoyment.
Interestingly, the park holds witnesses to every era of Latvian history: from the Devonian sandstones and the medieval crusader castles to the secret Līgatne nuclear bunker, built beneath a sanatorium to shelter the leadership of Soviet Latvia in the event of nuclear war, and today a Cold War time capsule. After independence was restored in 1991, Gauja National Park established itself as the country's great nature destination. Green in summer, ablaze in autumn and snow-covered in winter, the Gauja valley is still, as it was a century and a half ago, the 'Switzerland of Vidzeme': the wild heart of Latvia.
