Jūrmala is the great Baltic seaside resort, the place Riga has escaped to for more than two centuries to soak up the sun, breathe pine-scented air and swim in the sea. Its name says it all: 'seashore'. It's 25 kilometres of fine white sand, so wide and flat that at low tide it seems never to end, backed by dunes and pine forests and dotted with wooden villas with little turrets, lookouts and carpentry lacework that look straight out of a fairy tale.
But Jūrmala isn't just a beach. It has one of the largest concentrations of wooden summer architecture in all of northern Europe: hundreds of houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from the time of the tsars, when the Russian aristocracy came here to rest and take the cure, and from the Soviet period, when huge sanatoriums welcomed workers from across the USSR. That mix of elegant seaside resort and spa town, of stately villas and modernist sanatoriums, gives it a unique feel, somewhere between nostalgic and luminous.
This guide explores Jūrmala with a practical, relaxed eye: how to get there by train from Riga in half an hour, which station to get off at depending on what you're after, where the best beach is, what Jomas pedestrian street is like, which wooden villas are worth seeing, where to treat yourself to a spa and how to escape to the forest and boardwalks of Ķemeri National Park. It's the perfect complement to a visit to Riga: the sea, the pine woods and Baltic summer life just a step from the capital.
Jūrmala was born as a resort in the early 19th century, when Russian army officers —among them Field Marshal Barclay de Tolly— began spending their summers in Dubulti after the Napoleonic Wars. The opening of the Riga-Tukums railway in 1877 turned it into the fashionable coast of the Russian Empire, with wooden villas, casinos and mud and sulphur baths, especially at the Ķemeri spa. In Soviet times, Jūrmala was the favourite resort of the nomenklatura —Brezhnev and Khrushchev holidayed here— and it filled up with large workers' sanatoriums. Today it preserves one of Europe's largest collections of wooden summer architecture and is still Riga's seaside and spa escape. We tell the whole story on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Hanseatic capital founded in 1201, with the world's largest collection of Art Nouveau architecture, and its neighbouring white-sand seaside resort on the gulf.
Read the history of Riga and the coast (Jūrmala) →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.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For centuries, this white-sand coast between the Gulf of Riga and the Lielupe River was little more than a string of Livonian and Latvian fishing villages living off the Baltic and the pine forests. Nobody went to the beach for pleasure: the sea meant work, not leisure. Everything changed in the early 19th century, when half of Europe discovered that sea air, cold baths and mineral waters could 'cure', and the shoreline turned into a resort.
The first push came from war. After the Napoleonic campaigns, officers of the Russian army who had fought in the region began coming back to this coast to recover and rest. Among the first distinguished summer visitors was Field Marshal Barclay de Tolly, hero of the 1812 war against Napoleon, who was one of the first to build himself a summer house in Dubulti. The aristocracy and middle classes of Riga and the Russian Empire followed his lead, and those fishing villages began filling up with little summer cottages.
Over time, that cluster of resort villages —Bulduri, Dzintari, Majori, Dubulti, Ķemeri— came to be known by a single name that says it all: Jūrmala, 'the seashore'. One of the best-loved resorts in Eastern Europe was born.
The event that turned Jūrmala into a fashionable destination was the arrival of the train. In 1877 the Riga-Tukums railway line opened, running along the coast and putting the beaches half an hour from the capital. Suddenly, a summer by the sea was no longer reserved for a wealthy few with carriages: Riga's middle class could escape to the beach by train. In 1912 a direct rail connection to Moscow was even established, and Jūrmala filled with holidaymakers from all over the Empire.
This was the resort's belle époque. On both sides of the tracks, hundreds of two-storey wooden villas went up, with little turrets, glazed verandas, bay windows and lacework of carved woodwork, in a style somewhere between romantic and eclectic that is now the city's architectural signature. Hotels, casinos, dance halls, restaurants and bathhouses opened. Jomas Street, in Majori, became established as the social promenade where people went to see and be seen.
Ķemeri, at the western end, is a chapter of its own. As early as the late 18th century, sulphur springs and muds believed to have healing powers were known there. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ķemeri became a famous spa for sulphur and mud baths, with a large park, fountains and, later, an imposing spa hotel. The area lived on the reputation of its waters: people came from all over the Empire to 'take the cure' among the pines.
The First World War and the Russian Revolution brought the party to a halt. The front came dangerously close, many Russian holidaymakers vanished with the collapse of the Empire, and the coast went on pause. But with Latvia's independence in 1918, Jūrmala was reborn as the young republic's national resort.
In the interwar period, the coast remained the place where Latvian society went to unwind, and its atmosphere also drew artists and writers. Dubulti in particular earned a reputation as a retreat for the intelligentsia and the cultural aristocracy. Aspazija lived and wrote there, one of the great figures of Latvian literature: poet, playwright and women's rights activist, and wife of the celebrated poet Rainis. Her wooden house in Dubulti is now a museum, and she embodies that Jūrmala of summer holidays and creativity.
In 1920 the coastal railway line was completed and the string of resorts kept growing. Jūrmala was then much of what it still is today: a long garden city stretched out between the sea and the river, made of wooden houses, pines, sand and the promise of a Baltic summer.
The Second World War brought the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and with them destruction and tragedy on this coast too. But it was during the long postwar period, with Latvia absorbed into the Soviet Union, that Jūrmala went through its deepest and most contradictory transformation.
The Soviet regime turned Jūrmala into one of its great holiday destinations, a prestigious resort for the whole USSR. High-ranking Communist Party officials came here for the summer: leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev are said to have enjoyed this coast. The city filled with sanatoriums and rest homes —the famous Soviet sanatoriums— where workers, trade unionists and officials from all over the country spent state-subsidised stays of 'health and rest'.
That boom came at a cost. Many of the delicate wooden villas from the tsarist era were nationalised, subdivided or abandoned, and in some cases demolished to make way for large concrete buildings: sanatoriums, spas and holiday complexes with an unmistakably Soviet look. Jūrmala thus went from aristocratic retreat to planned mass-tourism centre. The Dzintari Concert Hall, open-air among the pines, became one of the great music venues of the Soviet summer, and went on attracting artists and festivals for decades.
With Latvia's restored independence in 1991, Jūrmala changed its skin once again. The big state sanatoriums closed or were privatised, many wooden villas were restored and turned into boutique hotels, private homes or museums, and the city reinvented itself as a destination for the sea, spas and wellness, this time for an international crowd and for Latvians themselves.
Today Jūrmala is, above all, Riga's seaside escape and one of the country's heritage gems. It holds one of the largest collections of wooden summer architecture in Northern Europe, cared for like treasure; its 25-kilometre beach flies Blue Flags; and its old spa tradition lives on, transformed into a strong offering of spas and wellness centres, distant heirs to the sulphur baths of Ķemeri. Ķemeri National Park, with its boardwalk across the Great Ķemeri Bog, also protects the landscape of peat bogs and forests surrounding the old spa.
Walking through Jūrmala means reading, in its wooden turrets, its concrete sanatoriums and its pine woods, two centuries of the same idea: that people came to this cold, luminous sea to heal, to rest and to dream. From the Russian officer building a little house in Dubulti to today's traveller booking a spa among the pines, the coast keeps the same promise.
