Ventspils is Latvia's neat surprise. In a country where many cities still carry the grey patina of the Soviet era, this western port city decided to reinvent itself as the cleanest, most flower-filled and orderly city in the country, and it succeeded with flying colours. Walking its cobbled streets, its spotless parks and its seafront promenade, coming across life-size colourful cows everywhere, gives you the feeling of being somewhere where everything works and everything is cared for down to the last detail.
But Ventspils is not just tidiness: it is a centuries-old port with a medieval Livonian Order castle still standing since the 13th century, a white-sand Blue Flag beach that is among the best on the Baltic, a narrow-gauge little train with a century-old steam locomotive that runs through the Seaside Open-Air Museum, and a relaxed, family-friendly atmosphere that makes it ideal for travelling with kids. All of this alongside the cranes and ships of one of the busiest ports in the eastern Baltic.
This guide explores Ventspils with a practical, warm eye: what to see in its castle and old town, how to enjoy the beach and the Venta riverside promenade, where to board the Mazbānītis, how to get there from Riga and how to fit it into a Kurzeme route together with Kuldīga, Cape Kolka and Liepāja. Whether you come for a day or stay on to enjoy the sea, Ventspils has that calm, luminous charm of the Baltic's good provincial towns.
Ventspils was born as a port of the Livonian Order in the 13th century, around the castle that still overlooks the Venta River, and became a member of the Hanseatic League, trading across the Baltic. In the 17th and 18th centuries, under the Duchy of Courland, it lived through a remarkable period: Duke Jacob Kettler turned Ventspils into the base of a small fleet that went on to found colonies in Tobago (Caribbean) and on St Andrew's Island (Gambia, Africa). Then came centuries of Russian rule, port industrialisation, the wars of the 20th century and the Soviet era, when the port became strategic for oil exports. After Latvia's independence in 1991, Ventspils set out to become the cleanest and best-kept city in the country. We tell the whole story 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 →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Ventspils was born where geography called the shots: at the mouth of the Venta River on the Baltic Sea, a spot made for trade and seafaring. Its name says it all, because 'Ventspils' literally means 'Venta castle' (pils is Latvian for castle). And sure enough, it all started with a castle. Around 1290, the knights of the Livonian Order, the Baltic branch of the Teutonic Order, built a stone fortress by the river mouth to control the port and the trade in the area. That castle, with walls dating back to the late 13th century, still stands today. It is the oldest building in the city and one of the best-preserved castles of a military order in this part of the Baltic.
Under the fortress's protection, a port settlement grew up and soon turned towards the sea. In the 14th century, Ventspils (then known by its German name, Windau) joined the Hanseatic League, the powerful network of trading cities in northern Europe. Its ships traded across the Baltic, exporting timber, grain, flax and other goods from the region, and importing from the great Hanseatic ports. The city became a trading hub of Courland, its life tied entirely to the rhythm of the port and the tides.
For centuries, the story of Ventspils was that of so many cities on the eastern Baltic: ruled by the Baltic German nobility and the Order, with a working population of Latvians, Germans and other peoples, and an economy that depended on the river and the sea.
The most astonishing and unexpected chapter in the history of Ventspils came in the 17th century, when this small port town became, for a while, the base of a miniature colonial empire. After the Livonian Order was dissolved in 1561-1562, the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was born, a small vassal state of Poland-Lithuania. Under Duke Jacob Kettler (Jēkabs, who ruled from 1642 to 1682), Courland enjoyed a surprising economic golden age.
Jacob was a committed mercantilist with a passion for the sea. He turned Ventspils (Windau) into a major shipyard and port: dozens of merchant ships and warships were built there, and from there sailed the fleet of a duchy that barely showed up on maps. The incredible part is where those ships went. Courland founded a colony on the island of Tobago, in the Caribbean (named New Courland), and another on St Andrew's Island, at the mouth of the Gambia River in West Africa. For a few years, Ventspils was the starting point of a trade that reached three continents: sugar and tobacco from the Caribbean, gold and ivory from Africa, goods from the Baltic.
It was a short-lived, fragile dream. The colonies were tiny and hard to defend; the Dutch, the English and events in Europe finished them off. The Second Northern War (1655-1660) hit the duchy hard, Duke Jacob himself was even taken prisoner by the Swedes, and the colonial dream faded away. But the saga stayed in people's memory: that time when, from a little Baltic port, Courland had colonies in the Caribbean and in Africa.
In 1795, with the Third Partition of Poland, the Duchy of Courland was annexed by the Russian Empire, and Ventspils (Windau) became part of the Courland Governorate within the empire of the tsars. During the 19th century, the city remained a mid-sized port, but its big leap came at the end of the century, when the empire invested in modernising its ports on the eastern Baltic.
The key was the railway. The rail link connected Windau with the interior of the empire and turned the city into an outlet to the sea for Russian exports: grain, timber and other goods arrived by train and were loaded onto ships. The port, which had the huge advantage of staying almost always ice-free, grew and modernised, and with it grew the city, its industry and its population. By the early 20th century, Windau was a busy, expanding port of the Russian Empire.
Like so many Baltic cities, it had a mixed population of Latvians, Baltic Germans, Russians and a significant Jewish community. That port prosperity, however, would be brutally cut short by the wars that were about to devastate this whole part of Europe in the 20th century.
The 20th century was as tragic in Ventspils as in the rest of Latvia. The First World War brought the Eastern Front to Courland: the city was occupied by German troops, and its port and trade came to a standstill. Out of the collapse of the Russian and German empires came, in 1918, the first Republic of Latvia, and Ventspils became part of the new independent state. During the interwar period, the city recovered some of its port activity and went through a period of normality within the young republic.
But independence did not last long. In 1939-1940, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sealed the fate of the Baltic states: in 1940, the USSR occupied and annexed Latvia. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the country until 1944-1945. As in so many Latvian towns, the Jewish community of Ventspils was persecuted and murdered during the Nazi occupation, as part of the Holocaust that wiped out most of the country's Jewish population. It was one of the darkest chapters in local history.
In 1944-1945 the Red Army regained control, and Latvia was once again, for almost half a century, part of the Soviet Union. Courland, in fact, saw the last battles of the war on the Eastern Front, in the so-called 'Courland Pocket', where German troops held out until the final surrender in May 1945.
During the Soviet era, Ventspils went through a deep transformation. Its ice-free port made it a strategic location for the Soviet Union, especially as an export terminal for oil and chemicals: a large share of Soviet crude left for the world through Ventspils. The city filled up with port and industrial infrastructure, its population grew with workers from all over the USSR, and, like so many Soviet cities, it was marked by grey concrete and industrial pollution. At the same time, as a strategic port, it was a relatively closed city.
The big turning point came when Latvia regained its independence in 1991. Ventspils, still one of the richest and most important ports in the country thanks to oil transit, did something unusual: it reinvested that wealth in reinventing itself. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the city set out to become the cleanest, tidiest and best-kept in Latvia, with spotless parks, streets full of flowers, a model seafront promenade and a clear focus on family tourism. A cheerful symbol of that revival came in 2002, when Ventspils hosted the international street art event Cow Parade: many of those colourful cow sculptures stayed for good and are now an icon of the city.
Today Ventspils strikes a tricky balance: on one side, one of the busiest industrial ports on the eastern Baltic, with its cranes and ships; on the other, a charming tourist town with a Blue Flag beach, a medieval castle, a little steam train and a neatness that surprises everyone who arrives. From Hanseatic port to base of a colonial dream, from Soviet oil terminal to the tidiest city in the country: few Latvian cities have reinvented themselves as many times as Ventspils.
