Latvia's geography: a country decided by where the water goes

How the ice left the ground uneven

Latvia sits on the north-western edge of the East European Plain, and the plain is the operative word. Nothing much stands up: 98% of the country lies below 200 metres and most of it below 100 metres, so the relief that exists is not the work of folding or uplift but of ice: the Pleistocene glaciers pushed soil and debris into mounds and ridges during the Quaternary and then melted away and left them. Undulating plains cover about three quarters of the territory. Uplands of moderate hills cover the remaining quarter.

Those uplands fall into three groups, and each one carries a name older than the survey. The Kurzeme Upland in the west is divided by the Venta into a western and an eastern part. The Central Vidzeme Upland holds the highest ground in the country, Gaiziņkalns, recorded at 311.6 metres. In the south-east the Latgale uplands reach Lielais Liepukalns at 289 metres, on ground that now lies inside Rāzna National Park. Between Vidzeme and Latgale lies the East Latvian Lowland, crossed in places by moraine ridges that lie across the natural fall of the land and hold water behind them. Peat bogs are numerous there for exactly that reason.

The same glacial deposits set the limits on farming. Soils are predominantly podzolic, with calcareous soils on the Zemgale Plain south of Riga, the flattest and most productive ground in the country. Roughly 27% of the total territory is cultivable. In the hill country the moraines, eskers and drumlins break fields into fragments and leave slopes open to erosion, which is why the upland pattern of small fields threaded between woods and lakes has survived: there is nowhere level enough for consolidation to pay.

Published totals for the country's area differ by a few square kilometres depending on which survey is quoted, from 64,559 to 64,594 square kilometres. The boundary tables split that into 62,249 square kilometres of land and 2,340 square kilometres of inland water. Land borders run to 1,382 kilometres in total: 576 kilometres with Lithuania, 343 with Estonia, 292 with Russia and 171 with Belarus. Before the Second World War the south-eastern border met eastern Poland, and boundary changes made by the Soviet Union attached that territory to Belarus instead.

Why so much of Latvia needed draining

Mires occupy 9.9% of the territory. Of those, 42% are raised bogs, 49% are fens and 9% are transitional mires, and about 70% are recorded as untouched by development, which makes them refuges for plants and animals that have gone from farmed land elsewhere. Peat reserves are put at 480 million tonnes, and peat is one of the few materials the country holds in quantity, alongside dolomite at 615 million cubic metres, limestone at 6 billion cubic metres, high-quality clay at 375 million cubic metres and gypsum at 165 million cubic metres.

The rest of the country had to be made to drain. As of 2007 roughly 16,000 square kilometres of agricultural land, about 85% of the total, had been improved by drainage works: buried pipe, straightened and deepened streams, open ditches and polder dams. The irrigated area in the same accounting was 8.3 square kilometres. That pair of figures is the geography stated as arithmetic. Land in Latvia is too wet rather than too dry, and the engineering that made it farmable ran the other way from the engineering most agricultural countries needed.

The scale of that work shows up in Soviet-era accounts. Through the 1960s and 1970s land amelioration absorbed about one third of all agricultural investment in Latvia. The republic held one third of 1% of the territory of the Soviet Union and 11% of all its artificially drained land.

Rain arriving at the wrong moment compounds the problem. Heavy precipitation is common in August and September, at harvest, which forced heavy spending on grain-drying structures and ventilation systems and made mechanised sowing and harvesting difficult on waterlogged fields. The wet climate is also why Latvian farming leans towards animal husbandry and dairying, with much of the barley, oats and potato crop grown for feed rather than for the table.

Where the rivers run and what they carry

Latvia holds more than 12,500 rivers with a combined length of about 38,000 kilometres, and only 17 of them are longer than 100 kilometres. That is a drainage network of enormous density and very little individual size, which follows from a flat country with high humidity and short distances to the sea.

The exception is the Daugava, and it is an exception on every measure. It runs 1,005 kilometres in total, rising in the Valday Hills in Russia's Tver Oblast, crossing northern Belarus and covering 352 kilometres of Latvian ground before it empties into the Gulf of Riga. It is about 180 metres wide where it enters the country and between 650 and 750 metres wide at Riga. Its average annual flow is 21 cubic kilometres, and its total descent inside Latvia is 98 metres, which is a third of the height of the highest hill spread across the width of the country.

That descent is what made the river the country's power source, and every dam on it has been an argument. The Ķegums plant was built during the first period of independence. The Pļaviņas dam drew unusual protest in 1958 because it would flood historic sites and a gorge holding the Staburags cliff, a formation of the same cultural weight in Latvia as the Lorelei in Germany; construction was endorsed in 1959 after the replacement of Eduards Berklavs and the nationally oriented leadership by cadres under Arvīds Pelše. The Riga plant just above the capital provoked little objection. A fourth dam proposed at Daugavpils became the focus of mass protest in 1986 and 1987 and was never built, despite the money already spent on it.

The other rivers are smaller and mostly undammed. The Gauja, at 452 kilometres, is the longest river running entirely on Latvian territory, and Gauja National Park follows both its banks. More than 60% of the annual water volume of the six largest rivers arrives from neighbouring countries, principally Belarus and Lithuania, which makes water quality a matter of other governments' industrial regulation. In November 1990 a polymer works at Navapolatsk in Belarus released 128 tonnes of cyanide derivatives into the Daugava without warning anyone downstream, and the first sign in Latvia was dead fish.

Standing water is as characteristic as running water. There are 2,256 lakes larger than one hectare, covering about 1,000 square kilometres between them, and most are eutrophic. Lubāns is the largest at 80.7 square kilometres and Drīdzis the deepest at 65.1 metres. Neither is deep by the standards of a glaciated country, which is another way of saying the ice here scoured shallow.

How the sea made the western edge

The coast is the one boundary the ice did not draw and the one edge of Latvia that is unambiguous. Its length is given as 498 kilometres in the boundary tables, 494 in other summaries and 504 as a figure for sandy shore, and the differences come from where a surveyor decides the Gulf of Riga stops being coast. That gulf is a shallow inlet in the north-west, and the ports of Liepāja and Ventspils on the open Baltic hold harbours that stay workable through winter. The exclusive economic zone runs to 28,452 square kilometres.

What is unusual about the shoreline is how little is built on it. The western seaboard was a guarded Soviet frontier zone and almost every house near the water was razed or evacuated, so about 300 kilometres of seashore carry only pine and spruce forest and dune systems. Latvian law forbids construction within one kilometre of the sea, and the pressure to breach that line has been on the record since the restoration of independence. The exception is the stretch beside Riga, where Jūrmala grew into a resort of sanatoria and wooden villas under Soviet management and has stayed one.

The sea also supplies the country's oldest export. Amber, fossilised pine resin, washes up on the Baltic beaches and was traded to Rome and Byzantium along the Amber Road by the Proto-Baltic population that settled the eastern shore around 3000 BC. The name Dzintarzeme, Amberland, comes from the same material.

Why the climate stays cloudy and wet

The climate is classed as humid continental or as oceanic depending on the scheme, and both readings are defensible because the terrain is too flat to differentiate it by altitude. What separates one part of the country from another is distance from the sea. Average January temperatures range from about minus 1.7 degrees Celsius at Liepāja on the west coast to minus 6.6 degrees at Daugavpils in the south-east; July averages barely differ at all, 17.4 degrees at Liepāja against 17.6 at Daugavpils. Occasional drops towards minus 40 degrees are on the record, and summer jumps to about 34 degrees.

The constant is cloud. Riga records average annual precipitation of 633 millimetres, with 180 days a year on which precipitation falls, 44 days of fog and 72 days counted as sunny; other measurements put clear sunshine at 30 to 40 days a year. Continuous snow cover lasts about 82 days and the frost-free period about 177 days at Riga, against a national range of 125 to 155 frost-free days. Rainfall exceeds 500 millimetres on the lowlands and approaches or passes 760 millimetres on the uplands, which is enough of a difference to change what the same crop yields two hours' drive apart.

Daylight is the other seasonal fact. In December it is dark at nine in the morning and dark again before four in the afternoon, and the summers reverse it. Dry years are rare enough to be noted individually: 1992 produced the driest summer in the country's recorded weather history, and heavy rain the preceding spring kept the crop damage below what had been expected. Latvia's entry in the standard hazard tables lists no natural hazards at all.

How the forest took back the fields

Forest is the largest single land cover, and the current figure is the end of a reversal. In 1929 woodland covered 25.2% of the territory, the lowest share on record, after wartime clearance and the agrarian reform that handed new smallholders timber to sell. Forest cover has since climbed to about 54.7% as reported for 2023, when the Central Statistical Bureau recorded 3,305 thousand hectares. Measured against 1935, when the share was 26.8%, and 2020, when it reached 54.8%, the increase is 28 percentage points in 85 years.

Almost none of that came from planting new state forest. State holdings stood at 1,521 thousand hectares in 2023, slightly below the 1,530 thousand hectares held in 2009. The growth is in private and municipal woodland, and the reason is legible on the ground: most private forest today stands on fields and meadows that were farmed in the 1920s and 1930s and were abandoned afterwards. Fragmented, waterlogged or too far from a working farm, they grew back into pine, spruce and birch. The species split is roughly 34% pine, 30% birch and 18% spruce.

Harvesting runs below growth. Latvian forests put on about 25 million cubic metres of timber a year while 12 to 13 million cubic metres are felled, so the stock of mature stands keeps rising, and the area where forestry is prohibited outright rose from 107.9 thousand hectares in 2021 to 143.1 thousand hectares in 2022. Set against that, the 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index scored the country at 2.09 out of 10, a measure of how heavily managed the woodland is rather than how much of it there is. Nearly all forest is open to the public, and picking bilberries, cranberries and mushrooms in it is a general habit rather than a rural one.

The mix of habitats that results is unusual for the latitude. Oaks grow within a few hundred metres of bog cotton and cloudberries, because the moraine relief changes drainage over very short distances. A World Wildlife Fund survey in 1992 recorded sizeable populations of black stork, lesser spotted eagle, Eurasian otter, European beaver, Eurasian lynx and grey wolf, along with 86,000 red and roe deer, 32,000 wild boar, 25,000 elk and 13,000 red fox.

What the state has chosen to protect

Protection here is old and finely subdivided. The first conservation laws date from the 16th and 17th centuries, and the modern system counts 760 specially protected nature territories as recorded by the Nature Conservation Agency in November 2025, in eight categories. Alongside the national parks there is one biosphere reserve, North Vidzeme; 42 nature parks; 10 protected landscape areas; 372 nature reserves; four strict nature reserves at Teiči, Krustkalni, Moricsala and Grīņi; seven marine protected areas; and 320 nature monuments. Separately from those, 15,579 large trees and 119 large stones had been identified and registered by 1 January 2025, which is a conservation category made of individual objects.

The four parks divide neatly across the four historical regions, one each, and each protects a different form of the same wet landform: the Gauja's sandstone valley, the bogs and mineral springs behind Ķemeri, the ancient shoreline terraces at Slītere, the lake country of Rāzna. Nationally protected areas cover about 12,790 square kilometres, close to a fifth of the land. Since 2004 the existing sites were folded into the European Natura 2000 network and 122 new territories were added, giving 333 Natura 2000 sites that between them cover 58 habitat types and the recorded ranges of 93 bird species. The national list of endangered species, established in 1977, holds 112 plants and 119 animals.

Where Latvians live on this ground

Settlement follows the water rather than the height. The population was 1,845,096 as of 1 January 2026, of whom 588,911 lived in Riga, and 68.6% of the country was classed as urban in 2025. Riga stands at the mouth of the Daugava on the gulf that takes its name, which put it on the river route inland and the sea route out, and it has held that position since the medieval Hanseatic trade.

The constitution recognises four historical and cultural regions: Courland, Latgale, Vidzeme and Zemgale, with Selonia sometimes treated as a fifth. Their boundaries are not sharply defined and vary between sources, but the physical basis is clear enough. Zemgale is the grain plain, Kurzeme the peninsula with the sea on three sides, Vidzeme the central upland, Latgale the lake district on the eastern uplands where forest cover was 14.6% as late as 1929, the lowest of the four.

Seven cities hold state city status: Daugavpils, Jelgava, Jūrmala, Liepāja, Rēzekne, Riga and Ventspils. Four of them are ports and three of those, Riga, Ventspils and Liepāja, sit where a river meets the Baltic. In a mountain state the pattern of habitation follows valleys and passes. In a country this flat it follows the two things that vary: where solid ground meets navigable water, and where the drainage was good enough to farm. Between those points, the fields with birch groves standing in them, the bogs and the reclaimed forest fill in almost everything else.