Travelling in Latvia: a country the forest is taking back

Why the forest keeps advancing

In 1929 forest covered 25.2% of Latvia, the lowest share in the record. Roughly 215,000 hectares had been cleared during the First World War and the years immediately after, and that ground was not replanted: it went to new farmsteads under the agrarian reform, and settlers who needed money to build sold the timber standing on it. Cover varied sharply by region that year, from 34% in Courland and 27% in Vidzeme down to 14.6% in Latgale.

Everything since has run the other way. Soviet authorities in Latvia restricted logging and began restoration work in 1957, after official publications conceded that cutting at the rate of the late 1940s would exhaust the resource within ten to twenty years. The Central Statistical Bureau recorded 2,839 thousand hectares of forest in 1993 and 3,305 thousand hectares in 2023. As a share of the country, cover moved from 26.8% in 1935 to 54.8% in 2020.

Ownership shows where the new trees came from. In 1929 the state held 84% of the forest area, private owners 15% and municipalities 1%. By 2023 the state held 1,521 thousand hectares while 54% of the forest area belonged to somebody else, a smaller state holding than the 1,530 thousand hectares of 2009. Most private forest in Latvia stands on land that was field and meadow in the 1920s and 1930s.

Any figure quoted for forest cover depends on the definition behind it, and the definitions disagree by several percentage points.

The World Bank counts land under natural or planted stands of trees at least five metres tall, and excludes orchards, agroforestry and trees in urban parks and gardens, which is why its share sits above the national bureau's for some years and below it for others.

Nearly all of that forest can be walked into. Public access is the norm, and picking bilberries, cranberries and mushrooms is among the commonest uses Latvians make of it. Land where recreation is one of the main aims of forest management accounts for 8% of forestland and carries viewing platforms, marked trails, picnic places and interpretation, all of it free to enter. Harvesting stays well under growth: the forests put on about 25 million cubic metres of timber a year against 12 to 13 million felled, so the stock of mature stands keeps rising.

How a closed border emptied the coast

The Baltic shore is the one edge of Latvia that was not agreed with a neighbour, and the length published for it depends on the source, running from 494 to 504 kilometres.

For most of the Soviet period the western shore was a guarded frontier region. Almost every house near the sea was razed or its occupants moved inland, and the effect has outlived the reason. About 300 kilometres of coast is undeveloped, backed by pine and spruce forest and by dune systems, with construction inside one kilometre of the water prohibited by law. Slītere National Park, declared in 1999, protects part of that shore in Kurzeme.

The exception sits beside the capital. Jūrmala, on the gulf west of Riga, was a focus of tourism through the Soviet decades and still holds sanatoria, tall pines, sand beaches and older architecture. It was the only state city to gain population in 2024, by 1.3% or 680 people, in a year when Riga lost 1.2% and Ventspils 1.6%.

Amber, fossil pine resin, washes up along the same beaches and gave the country the epithet Dzintarzeme, Amberland. It has been traded off this coast for a long time: Baltic tribes were sending amber south to Rome and Byzantium in exchange for precious metals well before 900 AD. Liepāja and Ventspils are the warm-water harbours on this stretch, and both work as ports first.

Where the protected land actually is

The Nature Conservation Agency counted 760 specially protected nature areas in its register as updated in November 2025, leaving aside individually protected trees and boulders. They fall into categories that do very different jobs, and only some of them are places a visitor is expected to enter.

What the protection categories actually cover

Four national parks, each declared for a different part of the country: Gauja in Vidzeme in 1973, Ķemeri in Zemgale in 1997, Slītere in Kurzeme in 1999 and Rāzna in Latgale in 2007. The single biosphere reserve covers northern Vidzeme.

Latvia joined the Natura 2000 network in 2004. The protected areas that already existed were folded in and 122 new ones created, giving 333 sites, and the qualifying lists for Latvia run to 58 habitat types, 93 bird species, 29 mammals and 34 invertebrates.

Bog is the other habitat worth planning around. Mires occupy 9.9% of the country: 42% of that is raised bog, 49% fen and 9% transitional mire, and 70% of the total is recorded as undisturbed. Raised bogs are what the boardwalks are built across, and the rapid change from one ecosystem to the next means bog cotton and cloudberry grow within a few hundred metres of oak.

Which animals the forests hold

A World Wildlife Fund study in 1992 recorded sizable populations of black stork, lesser spotted eagle, Eurasian otter, European beaver, Eurasian lynx and grey wolf. It counted 86,000 red and roe deer together, 32,000 wild boar, 25,000 elk and 13,000 red fox. Small clear-cut areas, tracts of forest with little human intervention, and the movement of people out of the countryside are the reasons given for the survival here of species that have gone from other parts of Europe.

Why almost everything happens in Riga

At the beginning of 2025, 592,000 people lived in Riga: 31.9% of the country's population and 45.7% of everyone living in a town or city. Counting the surrounding region, 45.6% of residents were within reach of the capital. The city itself held 588,911 people on 1 January 2026, after losing 6,900 people, or 1.2%, during 2024.

That concentration explains the visitor pattern, because most tourists stay in Riga. The historic centre has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1997 for a medieval core, nineteenth-century boulevards, wooden urban housing and an extensive stock of Art Nouveau buildings. The old town of Kuldīga, in Courland, was added in 2023 as a surviving example of a town that grew under the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, with its street pattern and log architecture intact. The third Latvian listing is a shared one, the Struve Geodetic Arc.

Riga International Airport carried 7.8 million passengers in 2019 and flies direct to more than 80 destinations in 30 countries. Liepāja is the only other airport in the country with scheduled commercial services, which makes almost every arrival a Riga arrival.

The far end of the distribution is Latgale, in the east. It held 239,166 people at the beginning of 2025, 4,200 fewer than a year earlier, and its mean age was 45.9 years against 42.7 in the Riga region. Nearly a quarter of its residents, 24.4%, were 65 or older.

How flat ground shapes what visitors do

About 98% of Latvia lies below 200 metres and the highest point, Gaiziņkalns, reaches 311.6 metres. Because nothing is high, the climate is not differentiated by altitude, and the country has no mountain season and no ridge walking. Undulating plains cover about 75% of the surface and moderate uplands the remaining 25%, all of it shaped by Pleistocene ice into moraines, eskers and drumlins. About 27% of the territory is cultivable, the Zemgale plain south of Riga being the most productive ground.

Water takes the place terrain occupies elsewhere. There are more than 12,500 rivers running 38,000 kilometres in total, of which only 17 exceed 100 kilometres. The Gauja, at 452 kilometres, is the longest river lying wholly inside the country, and Gauja National Park has run along both its banks since 1973; the water is cold enough for trout and salmon, and it cuts sandstone cliffs in forest. The Daugava is longer at 1,005 kilometres, of which 352 are Latvian, and it enters the country about 180 metres wide and passes Riga between 650 and 750 metres wide.

The Daugava also carries the clearest Latvian example of a dammed river becoming a political subject. Construction of the Pļaviņas plant was endorsed in 1959 over objections to the flooding of a scenic gorge and of the Staburags cliff, and a fourth dam proposed at Daugavpils drew protests from hundreds of thousands of people in 1986 and 1987 and was never built.

Lakes finish the picture. There are 2,256 of them larger than one hectare, covering about 1,000 square kilometres between them. Lubāns is the largest by area at 80.7 square kilometres and Drīdzis the deepest at 65.1 metres. Rāzna National Park, declared in 2007, sits among the Latgale lakes.

When to go and what the seasons do

Latvia has four seasons of near-equal length, and winter is the long one. It runs from mid-December to mid-March, averages around minus 6 degrees Celsius, and brings stable snow cover, bright sun and very short days; spells near minus 30 degrees Celsius with heavy snowfall are common. In December it is still dark at nine in the morning and dark again before four in the afternoon.

Regional averages sit close together, because the country is small and low. January runs from minus 1.7 degrees Celsius at Liepāja on the west coast to minus 6.6 degrees Celsius at Daugavpils in the south-east, and July from 17.4 degrees Celsius at Liepāja to 17.6 degrees Celsius at Daugavpils. Summer proper, June to August, averages about 19 degrees Celsius with extremes to 35 degrees Celsius, and 2019 was the warmest year in the country's observation record.

Precipitation is the constant. Riga records 633 millimetres a year across 180 days with rain or snow, 44 days of fog and 72 days counted as sunny; continuous snow cover lasts 82 days and the frost-free period 177. Heavy rain during the August and September harvest is normal enough that Latvian farming is built around drying and drainage.

Two fixtures organise the summer for Latvians themselves. Jāņi, kept at the solstice, involves wreath making, gathering plants, bonfires, games, caraway cheese and beer, and staying awake until sunrise. The Song and Dance Celebration has been held since 1873, normally every five years, and draws around 30,000 performers; the Baltic tradition it belongs to was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2003 and inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

How visitors get around the country

The railway is a reminder of which empire built it. Of 1,860 kilometres of main network, 1,826 kilometres is 1,520 millimetre Russian gauge and 251 kilometres is electrified, and the system is incompatible with European standard gauge, so no through train arrives from Warsaw or Berlin. Rail Baltica, which would connect Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, Kaunas and Warsaw at standard gauge, has been under construction with a stated completion date of 2026.

Roads carry the rest. The national network is 1,675 kilometres of main road, 5,473 kilometres of regional road and 13,064 kilometres of local road, with a further 30,439 kilometres of municipal road and 8,039 kilometres of street. The A1, part of European route E67, runs up the coast between Warsaw and Tallinn, and the E22 crosses from Ventspils in the west to Terehova on the eastern border. There were 803,546 licensed vehicles in the country in 2017.

The practical arrangements are those of the European Union, which Latvia joined on 1 May 2004, and of the Schengen Area, joined on 21 December 2007. The currency is the euro, driving is on the right, mains supply is 230 volts through Europlug and Schuko sockets, and 112 is the general emergency number.

Language is the thing that varies most by region. Latvian is the sole official language. Russian was recorded as the mother tongue of 37.7% of the population in 2023 and as the language of the home for 34.6%, and it is heard most in the east and in Riga. Livonian, a Finnic language with a very small speaker community, is protected by law, and Latgalian is protected as a historical variant of Latvian. English is widely accepted in business and tourism.

Who has been counted as a visitor

Latvian tourism is measured, and the measurements are modest. 2.8 million visitors were recorded in 2018, 8% more than in 2017. In 2016 tourism accounted for 4.5% of gross value added, and tourism-related industries for 8.5% of total employment, or 77,100 jobs. An OECD report published in 2020 put the stock of hotels and other accommodation at 831 in 2018. The state tourism budget that year was 2.6 million euros, combining money from the state, the European Regional Development Fund and the European Destinations of Excellence programme.

Policy sits with the Ministry of Economics under the Tourism Law of 1998 and is delivered through the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia. The framework in use descends from the Tourism Development Guidelines drawn up for 2014 to 2020 and the agency's Tourism Marketing Strategy for 2018 to 2023, both of which set out to make the country better known and to train the service sector.

The institutional history is older than the restored republic. The Latvian Central Tourism Society was founded in 1929 by the interior and foreign ministries together with the Railway Central Board, and a Bureau of Tourism followed at the Foreign Ministry in 1931. Latvia recorded 85,719 foreign tourists that year, against 40,000 in Lithuania and 37,470 in Finland. By 1937 the country had 185 hotels, 68 boarding houses and 441 tourist houses, in which travellers stayed 57,279 nights.

The Soviet period ran the sector through the Latvian Republican Tourism and Excursion Board, established in 1946 and managing tourism from 1962 alongside the state agency Intourist until 1991. After independence was restored, responsibility sat with the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development from 1993 to 2003 before moving to the economics portfolio.