Riga is the great city of the Baltics, the largest and most vibrant of the region's three capitals. For centuries it was the Hanseatic jewel of these shores, the port through which the amber, timber and flax of northern Europe passed, and that old wealth can still be felt as you walk through its medieval old town: Gothic towers, guildhalls, merchants' houses, huge churches and cobbled squares where every stone has its legend.
But what makes Riga unique in the world is something else: it has the greatest concentration of art nouveau (Jugendstil) architecture on the planet. In the early 20th century, in the middle of an economic boom under the Russian Empire, the city mushroomed and filled with exuberant buildings, with stone faces, masks, lions, peacocks and floral motifs peeking out from every façade. Alberta and Elizabetes streets are an open-air museum of the style, which is why the whole ensemble, together with the old town, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
This guide explores Riga with a practical, warm approach: what to see in Vecrīga and the art nouveau district, how to get up to the great viewpoints, where to eat and get lost in the impressive Central Market, how to get around by tram and how to use the city as a base to discover Jūrmala, Sigulda and the rest of the Baltics. Whether you're coming for two days or staying a week, Riga combines rich history, dazzling architecture, good food and a youthful energy that surprises everyone.
Riga was founded in 1201 by the German bishop Albert of Buxhoeveden, who brought in the crusaders and made the city the spearhead of the Christianisation of the Baltics and the seat of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. In 1282 it joined the Hanseatic League and became the largest trading port in the eastern Baltic. After seven centuries of German, Polish, Swedish (from 1621) and Russian (from 1710) rule, Latvia declared independence in 1918 with Riga as its capital. Then came the Soviet occupation, the Nazi occupation with the extermination of the Jewish community, the Soviet occupation once again, and finally independence regained in 1991, sealed by the Riga Barricades of January that year. 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.
Riga was born neither of trade nor of chance, but of a crusade. At the start of the 13th century, the eastern Baltic was one of the last pagan regions of Europe, home to Livonian, Latgalian, Semigallian and Curonian peoples who worshipped their own gods and had traded amber, honey and northern furs since ancient times. The Church of Rome wanted to Christianise them, one way or another, and for that it sent hard men.
The most decisive was Albert of Buxhoeveden (Albert of Riga), a German cleric from Bremen who arrived in 1200 at the head of a crusader fleet. In 1201 he moved the bishopric from little Ikšķile to a strategic spot on the Daugava River, close to where it flows into the Baltic, and founded Riga there. That act of foundation, backed by merchants from the island of Gotland, is what is celebrated today as the city's birth.
Albert didn't come just to pray. In 1202 he founded the Order of the Brothers of the Sword (the Livonian Brothers of the Sword), a military order of warrior monks tasked with subduing the Baltic peoples, and in 1211 he laid the first stone of the cathedral, the Dom, which still dominates the old town. Riga thus became the capital of Livonia, the base from which the Northern Crusade, by fire and sword, brought these lands into Western Christendom. For the next seven centuries, those who ruled Riga spoke German.
Once the conquest was over, Riga found its true calling: trade. Its position was unbeatable, at the mouth of the Daugava, the great river linking the Baltic with the Russian interior and the routes towards Byzantium. Flax, timber, hemp, wax and furs from the east left through Riga, while manufactured goods from Western Europe came in.
In 1282 Riga joined the Hanseatic League, the powerful confederation of merchant cities in northern Europe, and became the largest trading port in the eastern Baltic. The city filled up with guilds, merchants' houses, brick churches and wealth. From that era come institutions as curious as the Brotherhood of Blackheads, a guild of unmarried and foreign merchants whose patron was Saint Maurice — hence the black head on its coat of arms — and whose headquarters, the House of the Blackheads, is still the most photographed building in Riga.
Real power lay with an elite of German-speaking merchants and clergy, the so-called Baltic Germans, who dominated the city's economic and social life for centuries, above the Latvian majority, which was rural and often enserfed. This divide between an urban German elite and a rural Latvian people would shape Latvia's history well into the 20th century. The Protestant Reformation arrived early and strongly: by the 1520s Riga had embraced Lutheranism, which is still the largest denomination.
Riga's wealth also made it a coveted prize. After the collapse of the Livonian Order's state in the mid-16th century during the long Livonian War, the city changed hands several times. It spent a while under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, in 1621, was conquered by King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Under Swedish rule, Riga became the largest city in the Swedish Empire, bigger even than Stockholm, and its walls and economy were strengthened.
The 18th century brought the big change of ownership. In the Great Northern War, Peter the Great of Russia took Riga from the Swedes: the city capitulated in 1710 and the Treaty of Nystad in 1721 formally made it part of the Russian Empire. For the next two centuries Riga was politically a Russian city, but kept its German character in everyday life: the tsars let the Baltic Germans run the province, with their language, their Lutheran Church and their privileges.
Under the Russian Empire, and above all in the second half of the 19th century, Riga went through a dizzying transformation. The arrival of the railway and industrialisation turned it into one of the leading ports and industrial centres of the whole Empire, with factories, shipyards and a population that multiplied. It was during that boom, around 1900, that the city filled with the spectacular Art Nouveau buildings that are now its signature: a third of the centre went up in that exuberant style in barely two decades. A Latvian working class and intelligentsia also grew, and began to dream of a nation of their own.
The 20th century began violently. The 1905 Revolution saw some of its most intense episodes in Riga and the Latvian countryside, with strikes, the burning of German landowners' manor houses and harsh tsarist repression. The First World War devastated the region: the front between the Russian Empire and Germany stayed stuck near Riga for years, the city was taken by the Germans in 1917 and much of its industry was evacuated to Russia.
The simultaneous collapse of the Russian and German empires created an opportunity. On 18 November 1918, at the National Theatre in Riga, the independence of the Republic of Latvia was proclaimed. But independence had to be won on the battlefield: during the Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920), Riga was fought over by the provisional Latvian government, the Bolsheviks who set up a short-lived Soviet republic, and German and White Russian troops. With help from allies — including the British Navy — and a national mobilisation, the Latvians secured their state.
Interwar Latvia, with Riga as its capital, was a small but thriving country: a land reform that redistributed the estates of the old German barons, a flourishing culture, and a cosmopolitan Riga nicknamed 'the Paris of the North'. As in much of Europe, democracy suffered: in 1934 Kārlis Ulmanis staged a coup and ruled in an authoritarian way. But the real catastrophe was coming from outside.
In August 1939, the secret pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) carved up Eastern Europe and placed Latvia in the Soviet sphere. In June 1940 the Red Army occupied the country and annexed it to the USSR after rigged elections. The first Soviet year was brutal: nationalisations, terror and, in June 1941, the mass deportation of thousands of Latvians — whole families, children included — to Siberia.
A few days later, in July 1941, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Latvia. Then began one of the darkest chapters in Riga's history: the Holocaust. Latvia's Jewish community, around 70,000 people and a central part of the city's life, was almost wiped out. In November and December 1941, in the Rumbula forest on the outskirts of Riga, some 25,000 Jews from the city's ghetto were shot over two days, in one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust before the gas chambers. Thousands of Jews from Germany and Austria were also deported to the Riga ghetto to meet the same fate. It is a wound the city remembers today with sober memorials at Rumbula and in the former ghetto.
In 1944 the Red Army retook Riga and Latvia came under Soviet rule again, this time for almost half a century. There were new mass deportations in 1949, forced collectivisation of the countryside and rapid industrialisation, along with heavy immigration of Russian-speaking workers that changed Riga's demographic make-up for good. The Soviet regime also left its mark on the landscape: the housing blocks, the factories and the imposing Stalinist skyscraper of the Academy of Sciences, which locals nickname 'Stalin's birthday cake'.
Freedom returned with perestroika. In the late 1980s, a peaceful national movement — channelled through the Popular Front of Latvia — began to demand independence. The most moving symbol of that awakening was the Baltic Way of 23 August 1989: two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania formed a human chain almost 600 kilometres long linking Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius to call for freedom. The Baltic 'Singing Revolution' turned choral singing into a political weapon.
The decisive moment came in January 1991. After the declaration restoring independence, Moscow tried to stop it by force and Soviet special forces units (the OMON) moved in on Riga. Thousands of Latvians poured into the streets and built barricades with lorries, logs and farm machinery to protect key government buildings, the radio and the television. These were the Riga Barricades. Several people died in the clashes — including cameramen filming the events — but the city did not give in. That winter of courage is remembered today at the 1991 Barricades Museum.
On 21 August 1991, as the hardline coup in Moscow was collapsing, Latvia fully declared the restoration of its independence, recognised shortly afterwards by the USSR itself. Since then Riga has been reborn: capital of a country that has been a member of the European Union and NATO since 2004, and that adopted the euro in 2014. Today it is the largest and most dynamic city in the Baltics, with a well-kept old town, an Art Nouveau district that is a World Heritage Site, a young food and cultural scene, and an ever-present awareness of what it cost to win back freedom. Walking around Riga means reading, in its Gothic stones, its Art Nouveau façades and its memorials, eight centuries of European history condensed on the banks of the Daugava.
