Riga Highlights and the Golden Sands of Jūrmala

Meeting by the ship

Meeting by the ship. The start time of the tour is given approximately and will be adjusted depending on your ship arrival time. The exact meeting time will be specified on your confirmation letter.

City drive

A drive through the boulevards of the 19th-century centre, past the National Opera, the Freedom Monument of 1935, whose figure of Milda holds up three stars for the historic regions of Latvia, the wooded Bastion Hill along the old moat, the University of Latvia and the bank of the Daugava.

Art Nouveau quarter

A walk through the Art Nouveau quarter around Alberta and Elizabetes streets. About a third of the buildings in central Riga are in the style, more than in any other city in Europe, most of them put up in a building boom between 1899 and 1914. The richest facades are by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of the film director, and are loaded with masks, screaming faces, peacocks, sphinxes and geometric ornament.

Old town walking tour

A walk into the medieval town, which UNESCO listed in 1997. Riga was founded in 1201 by Bishop Albert and grew rich in the Hanseatic League, and the lanes still hold the buildings of that trade: the Great and Small Guilds, St Jacob's Church, Riga Castle of 1330, now the president's residence, and the Powder Tower, the last of the towers of the city wall. Riga Cathedral on the largest square in the old town, begun in 1211 and the biggest medieval church in the Baltic states. Its organ, built by Walcker in 1884 with 6,718 pipes, was the largest in the world at the time and still draws organists from everywhere.

Drive to Jūrmala

A drive of about half an hour west along the Gulf of Riga

Jūrmala

A guided walk through Jūrmala, the strip of resort between the sea and the Lielupe river where Riga has taken its holidays since the early 19th century. Its beach runs for more than twenty kilometres of white sand, and the streets behind are lined with wooden summer villas of the 1900s, carved and verandaed, standing between the concrete sanatoria of the Soviet decades when the whole union came here to take the waters.

Free time in Jūrmala

Time for lunch and shopping on Jomas street, the pedestrian main street of the resort

Return to the ship

The drive back to the cruise port in Riga