Latvia

How the land came out flat and wet

Gaiziņkalns reaches 311.6 metres and nothing else in the country goes higher. On ground this level the variable that decides what a field is good for is drainage. The last ice sheet left moraine ridges lying across the natural fall of the land, and the water held back behind them made more than 12,500 rivers, 2,256 lakes larger than a hectare, and mires over 9.9% of the surface.

Farming here has therefore meant moving water off the ground. As of 2007 roughly 16,000 square kilometres of farmland, about 85% of the agricultural total, had been improved by artificial drainage, against an irrigated area of 8.3 square kilometres.

The Baltic coastline runs 494 kilometres and the shallow Gulf of Riga cuts into the north-west of the country. The Daugava, 1,005 kilometres long with 352 of them inside Latvia, reaches the sea at Riga, and that river mouth is why there is a city there at all: papal missionaries sailed up the Daugava in the late 12th century, Riga was founded in 1201, and in 1282 it entered the Hanseatic League as a point of east-west trade.

The geography article sets out the ice, the water, the forest and the coast.

Why the population was counted downward

The First World War emptied the place. Between the outbreak of the war and the elections to the Constitutional Assembly in April 1920, the population fell from 2,552,000 to 1,596,000, and Riga's from 520,000 to 225,000, as the front moved across the country, the factories were evacuated east and the refugees went with them. Independence was proclaimed by the People's Council on 18 November 1918, and the constitution adopted on 15 February 1922 is the one still in force.

The second rewriting was deliberate. Soviet forces occupied the country on 17 June 1940; on the night of 13 to 14 June 1941 the Soviet authorities deported 15,424 inhabitants, among them 1,771 Jews and 742 ethnic Russians, to camps and settlements mostly in Siberia, and about 35,000 people were deported during the first year of occupation. The Holocaust claimed approximately 85,000 lives in Latvia, the vast majority of them Jewish. After 1945 Moscow sited advanced Soviet manufacturing here, machinery at Jelgava, electrotechnical works in Riga, chemical plants at Daugavpils, Valmiera and Olaine, and there were not enough people left to run the factories, so workers arrived from across the Soviet Union.

The count of Latvians fell at each of those measurements while the share fell and then recovered, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs put Latvians at 63.8% of the population in January 2026. The Central Statistical Bureau counted 1,845,096 residents on 1 January 2026. Over 2024 the total dropped by 1.0%, or 18,400 people, of which 13,800 came from deaths outnumbering births and 4,600 from net migration.

The history article carries this from the crusader conquest through the occupations to the restoration.

What the restored republic decided about citizens

Latvian constitutional doctrine treats the republic proclaimed in 1918 as having continued in law throughout the occupations, which made 1991 a resumption. That premise settled who belonged to the resumed state. Citizenship was renewed in 1991 for the people who had held it on 17 June 1940 and for their descendants, whatever their ethnicity, and the people who had moved to Latvia during the Soviet period had to naturalise as any other foreign national would.

In 1995 the state created a temporary status for former citizens of the USSR holding no other citizenship, the non-citizens of Latvia. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes the status as unrelated to language or ethnicity, as carrying permanent residence by law, and as differing from citizenship mainly in the right to vote and to hold posts in the civil service or in national security.

The proportions have moved steadily since. Non-citizens were almost 30% of the population in 1996; at the beginning of 2026 the Central Statistical Bureau put citizens of Latvia at 87.9%, non-citizens at 8.7% and citizens of other countries at 3.4%. A law passed in 2019 ended the granting of the status to newborns, so that from 1 January 2020 a child of two non-citizen parents holds Latvian citizenship at birth.

The politics article goes into the Satversme, the hundred seats of the Saeima and the alliances the restored state joined.

How Latvian became the only state language

Latvian is the sole official language of the state. Latgalian is protected in law as a historical variant of it and Livonian as the language of the indigenous Liv population. Russian is still spoken by a large share of the population: 37.7% named it as a mother tongue in 2023 and 34.6% spoke it at home, a group that includes people who are not ethnically Russian.

The question of its status was put to a vote. In the constitutional referendum of 18 February 2012 on adopting Russian as a second official language, 74.8% voted against and 24.9% in favour, on a turnout of 71.1%. Schooling followed. As of 2014 there were 109 minority schools teaching in Russian, taking 27% of all pupils and using the language for 40% of subjects. From 2019 Russian-language instruction was withdrawn in stages from private higher education and from state secondary schools, and the transition to Latvian as the sole language of instruction was reported complete in September 2025.

What the country sells and what it hauls

The transport plant Latvia inherited was laid out for cargo that started somewhere else. Of a railway network of 1,860 kilometres, 1,826 are laid to the 1,520 millimetre Russian gauge and cannot take European standard-gauge trains, and the Rail Baltica line from Helsinki through Tallinn, Riga and Kaunas to Warsaw was under construction with completion set for 2026.

That traffic has gone. Rail freight fell from 24.1 million tonnes in 2020 to 11.1 million tonnes in 2024, a fall of 28.2% in 2024 alone, and the ports handled 36 million tonnes in 2024, with 18.1 million at Riga, 8.2 million at Ventspils and 7 million at Liepāja. What grew instead came out of the ground on its own. Forest covered 25.2% of Latvia in 1929 and 54.7% by the count published in January 2024, and wood made up 14.5% of goods exports in December 2025, in a year when goods exports came to 19.54 billion euros against imports of 23.19 billion. The currency has been the euro since 1 January 2014.

The economy article follows the corridor, the crash of 2008 and what the factories make now.

Why singing turned into a national institution

The Latvian folk song was catalogued before there was a Latvian state to keep it. The Cabinet of Folksongs assembled around the folklorist Krišjānis Barons holds nearly 218,000 song texts on more than 350,000 handwritten slips, and it entered UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2001.

That corpus supplied a public institution. The first general Latvian Song Festival was held in Riga in 1873, and the celebration has since normally run on a five-year cycle with about 30,000 performers taking part, sustained by a standing network of amateur choirs, dance groups, orchestras and craft studios. Under Soviet rule the repertoire was censored and the event carried Soviet commemorative requirements, and it kept its organisation and its crowds throughout. On 23 August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Latvians joined Estonians and Lithuanians in a human chain 600 kilometres long from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius.

The built record is thinner and more scattered, because the wars took a great deal of it. The Historic Centre of Riga was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1997 for its medieval core, its boulevards, its wooden houses and its Art Nouveau stock, and the old town of Kuldīga followed in 2023 as a surviving example of a Courland trading settlement in log architecture.

The culture article deals with the language, the regions, the calendar and the table.

What a visitor actually finds here

The country a visitor arrives in is emptier than the map suggests. Riga held 588,911 people on 1 January 2026, close to a third of the national total, and the mean age of the population was 43.5 years at the beginning of 2025, ranging from 42.7 years in the Riga region to 45.9 in Latgale.

Outside the capital the ground is forest, bog and coast. Four national parks were designated in turn, Gauja in 1973, Ķemeri in 1997, Slītere in 1999 and Rāzna in 2007, inside a list of 760 protected areas held by the Nature Conservation Agency and updated in November 2025. About 300 kilometres of the shore carry almost no development, an inheritance of the closed Soviet frontier zone that kept people off the western coast for decades. Latvia has been inside the Schengen Area since December 2007 and uses the euro, so arrivals from other Schengen countries cross no border control.

The travel article takes up the seasons, the regions, the parks and getting around.

What all of it comes back to

A low, wet, wooded country on the eastern Baltic, holding fewer people each year, governed under a constitution written in 1922 and restored in 1991 on the argument that the state had never legally stopped existing. The six articles above take each part of that in turn.