Liepāja is Latvia's most rock 'n' roll and windiest city, a Baltic port with a very distinctive personality. It is called 'the city where the wind is born' because of the relentless breeze blowing in from the sea, and it is also the undisputed capital of Latvian music: the Liepājas dzintars ('Liepāja Amber') festival was born here in 1964, and the whole city breathes rock, with its Great Amber (Lielais dzintars) concert hall, an amber-glass building that glows by the harbour.
But Liepāja is much more than music. It has one of the longest and most beautiful urban beaches in the country, with a Blue Flag, white sand and dunes; an old town of wooden houses and art nouveau buildings; the House of Craftsmen, home to the world's longest amber necklace; and, above all, Karosta, a fascinating, desolate military district built by the Russian Empire, with a monumental Orthodox cathedral, seaside forts and a prison you can visit today, where you can even spend the night as a 'prisoner'.
This guide explores Liepāja with a practical, friendly eye: what to see in the centre, on the beach and in Karosta, how much the visits cost, how to get there from Riga by bus or train, and how to fit it into a Kurzeme route together with Kuldīga, Ventspils and Cape Kolka. A city of contrasts, between amber, rock, wind and the military memory of the Baltic.
Liepāja grew up as a port on the west coast and received its town rights in 1625, in the days of the Duchy of Courland, which dreamed of becoming a naval power. Its great advantage was always its ice-free harbour. In the late 19th century, the Russian Empire turned it into a huge naval base, Karosta, a 'city within the city' with a cathedral, barracks and forts that came to house tens of thousands of people. During the War of Independence, Liepāja was even briefly the capital of Latvia while Riga was occupied. It lived through the world wars, the occupations and the Soviet era, when Karosta was a closed military base. After independence in 1991, the city reinvented itself as a cultural and rock capital. We cover all of this on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The old Courland of the Curonians and of the duchy that held colonies in Tobago and Gambia, with ports, dunes and the coast where the Livonian language is dying out.
Read the history of Kurzeme: the west and its beaches →They depart from Klaipėda, 90 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Like almost every town on this coast, Liepāja owes its existence to the sea and to a port that rarely freezes. In the Middle Ages, where a small river flows into Lake Liepāja, there was a settlement of fishermen and merchants, recorded under the German name Libau. The area belonged to the Curonians, one of the ancient Baltic peoples, before it came under the rule of the Livonian Order and the Church during the German conquest of the Baltic in the 13th and 14th centuries.
The big boost came with the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, the small state that emerged in 1562 after the Livonian Order was dissolved. The Dukes of Courland dreamed of turning their duchy into a naval and trading power, and for that they needed ports. Liepāja (Libau) received its town rights in 1625, a turning point that changed it from a village into a town with its own institutions. Under Duke Jacob Kettler, in the 17th century, Courland enjoyed its maritime golden age, with shipyards and even colonies in the Caribbean and Africa, and Liepāja profited from that trading boom.
Its decisive advantage was always the same: a port that stayed ice-free for almost the whole year, something very rare in the eastern Baltic. That one feature would shape its entire destiny, drawing the interest of the great powers that fought over the region in the centuries that followed.
In 1795, when the Russian Empire annexed the Duchy of Courland, Liepāja (Libau) became part of the tsars' empire, within the Courland Governorate. Far from declining, the town grew strongly during the 19th century, once again thanks to its ice-free port, which made it one of north-western Russia's main trading outlets to the world.
The arrival of the railway, which linked Libau with the interior of the empire, sent its growth soaring. The town industrialised, its population expanded with Latvians, Baltic Germans, Russians, Jews and Lithuanians, and the port buzzed with activity. Libau also became one of Eastern Europe's great emigration ports: in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of emigrants, many of them Jews fleeing the pogroms and poverty of the Russian Empire, set sail from here for Britain and, above all, the United States. For countless families, Liepāja was their last sight of Europe before the Atlantic.
That cosmopolitan prosperity left its mark on the town's architecture, with Art Nouveau buildings, wooden houses and the feel of a port city open to the world, which Liepāja still keeps today.
The most monumental and unusual chapter in Liepāja's history began in the late 19th century, when the Russian Empire decided to build one of its major Baltic naval bases here. By decree of Tsar Alexander III, from the 1890s a colossal military and port complex rose north of the town: Karosta ('war port' in Latvian).
Karosta was designed as a true 'town within the town', with its own street plan, red-brick barracks, officers' housing, hospitals, a riding school, coastal fortifications and an imposing Orthodox naval cathedral, St Nicholas, consecrated in 1903 in the presence of Tsar Nicholas II. At its height it housed tens of thousands of people and a large part of Russia's Baltic Fleet. Forts and coastal batteries were also built to defend the base, and their ruins can still be seen by the sea today, half-wrecked by the waves and by demolition blasts.
Karosta's life as an imperial base was fairly short but intense. During the First World War, the town was occupied by German troops, and from the collapse of the Russian and German empires the First Republic of Latvia was born in 1918. Karosta and the whole of Liepāja were entering a new and turbulent era.
Liepāja played a starring role in the birth of independent Latvia. During the War of Independence (1918-1920), when Riga was held by hostile forces, the Latvian provisional government took refuge in Liepāja, which briefly became the country's de facto capital. Much of the political and military struggle of those decisive years, which secured Latvia's independence, played out in the port of Liepāja.
The interwar period brought a degree of normality, but the Second World War hit the town hard. In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Latvia. In June 1941, with the German invasion of the USSR, Liepāja was one of the first places to fall, after fierce fighting. Then came one of the most horrific chapters in its history: under Nazi occupation, Liepāja's large Jewish community was wiped out in the Holocaust. In December 1941, in the Šķēde dunes north of the town, several thousand Jewish people were murdered in one of the best-documented massacres of the Holocaust in Latvia, sadly known for the photographs taken by the perpetrators themselves. Today the town remembers this with restraint and with memorials.
In 1944-1945, Liepāja lay inside the 'Courland Pocket', where German troops held out until the final surrender in May 1945. When the war ended, Latvia and Liepāja came under Soviet rule again, this time for almost half a century.
In the Soviet era, Liepāja was a strategic military town and largely closed. Karosta became a naval base again, now for the Soviet Baltic Fleet, and the whole area was off-limits to the public: you needed a permit to get in, and even many of the town's own residents couldn't enter freely. Karosta's military prison, where punished sailors and political prisoners were held throughout the century under both the tsars and the Soviets, is today the most visible symbol of that military past.
Yet, paradoxically, something very free flourished in that grey, closed city: music. In 1964 the Liepājas dzintars ('Liepāja Amber') festival was held for the first time, and the town fully earned its title as the capital of Latvian rock, the birthplace of bands and musicians who shaped the country's culture even under Soviet censorship. Rock became part of Liepāja's identity, so much so that today it has a 'walk of fame' dedicated to its musicians.
When Latvia regained its independence in 1991 and Soviet troops withdrew, Liepāja finally opened up and reinvented itself. Karosta went from secret base to tourist attraction, the port was repurposed, and the town bet on culture, music and the sea. The emblem of this new era is the Great Amber (Lielais dzintars) concert hall, opened in 2015, an amber-coloured glass building that glows beside the port and proclaims, now in freedom, the musical calling of this windy city. From ducal port to imperial base, from Holocaust site and closed military town to rock capital: Liepāja carries the whole intense and contradictory history of the Baltic in its streets, its dunes and its forts.
