Travelling in Lithuania: a country arranged around a short season

How the light divides the Lithuanian year

The Lithuanian Hydrometeorological Service recalculates its standard climate normal every ten years, and the 1991 to 2020 edition puts the country's annual sunshine at 1,917 hours. The total is spread unevenly enough to organise a visit around. May and July each take 283 hours; December takes 29. November, December, January and February supply about 174 hours between them, which is less than either of the two bright months manages alone.

Temperature follows the same curve without matching it. On the 1991 to 2020 normal the warmest month is July at 18.3 °C and the coldest is January at −2.9 °C, for an annual mean of 7.4 °C, half a degree above the 1981 to 2010 figure it replaced. July is also the wettest month at 84 millimetres of rain, and April the driest at 37 millimetres, so the brightest weeks and the wettest weeks are the same weeks.

Wind runs against the light and matters most on the coast. The 1991 to 2020 normal gives an annual average wind speed of 3.1 metres per second, falling to 2.4 and 2.5 metres per second in August and July and rising to between 3.4 and 3.6 from November through February. Severe storms are common near the coast and rare in the east of the country.

The two ends of the country do not share a winter. The coast averages 1.6 °C in January and 17.8 °C in July on the standing long-run averages, while Vilnius averages −3.7 °C in January and 18.1 °C in July: milder by the sea in the cold months, marginally cooler there in the warm ones. Snow falls every year and can fall in any month from October to April, and in some years sleet arrives in September or May.

The largest event in the calendar sits inside the bright half for the same reason everything else does. The Baltic song and dance celebrations, proclaimed by UNESCO in 2003 and inscribed on the Representative List in 2008, come round every fourth year in Lithuania and every fifth in Estonia and Latvia. They run over several days and assemble as many as 40,000 singers and dancers, mostly amateur choirs and dance groups that rehearse through the year in community centres and local cultural institutions.

What the law counts as a resort

Lithuania designates its leisure places by statute. Five towns hold the status of resort and five further areas are designated resort territories, which fixes in law where the state expects visitors to stay and what those places are for.

Druskininkai is the clearest case of a town manufacturing its own weather. The spa town in the south carries a water park and the Snow Arena, an indoor ski slope, the two of them joined by a cable car, in a country whose highest ground is Aukštojas Hill at 294 metres. Birštonas upstream on the Nemunas is balneological and sits in pine forest. Anykščiai in the middle of the country pairs a ski slope with a spa, on the same logic.

On the coast the designations are older and the season is shorter. Palanga is described as the summer capital and holds the Amber Museum, a branch of the Lithuanian Art Museum whose display runs to 28,000 pieces of amber, about 15,000 of them containing inclusions of insects, spiders or plants and some 4,500 worked into jewellery or artwork. Šventoji sits north of it at the river mouth. Neringa is not a town in the ordinary sense but the municipality covering the Lithuanian settlements strung along the Curonian Spit.

The territories are lake and forest country almost throughout, and the one former entry on the list, the mineral springs resort at Likėnai, shows that the designation is administered and can lapse.

Why the Curonian Spit limits its visitors

The spit is 98 kilometres long and between 0.4 and 4 kilometres wide, and it is the one place in the country where the number of visitors has been written down as a conservation problem. UNESCO inscribed it in 2000 under criterion (v) as a cultural landscape: a sand-dune terrain under permanent threat from wind and tide, which survives because of continuous human work against erosion after logging in the 17th and 18th centuries set the dunes moving onto the villages.

Eight small settlements cover about 6% of its land. The Lithuanian ones, Smiltynė, Juodkrantė, Pervalka, Preila and Nida, were fishing villages that became resort settlements, and a cultural leisure tradition of artists, scientists, yachtsmen and glider pilots established itself there during the 19th century. That inheritance is now the fabric under pressure. UNESCO names the oldest wooden fishermen's houses, the wooden decoration of the professionally designed nineteenth-century buildings, and the human-made protective coastal dune ridge as the most vulnerable elements of the property.

The World Heritage documentation states plainly that it is very important to regulate the number of visitors, lists excessive development and tourism beside climate change, severe weather and fire among the pressures on the site, and calls for a tourism management plan inside an integrated plan covering the whole spit. The property is shared with the Russian Federation. The Lithuanian half lies inside Curonian Spit National Park and is administered by the Neringa and Klaipėda municipalities; the other half lies inside Kurshskaya Kosa National Park in the Kaliningrad Oblast, and the two states are still working towards a joint plan.

Access is through Klaipėda, at the narrow mouth of the Curonian Lagoon, which is the country's ice-free port and holds the Lithuanian Sea Museum and its dolphinarium.

What is left of the Grand Duchy

Vilnius appears in the written record in the Letters of Gediminas in 1323 and was the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose chancery worked in Ruthenian and later in Polish. Its old town is on the World Heritage list, and what stands there is Gothic, Renaissance and baroque built over four centuries by that state. Vilnius University was founded in 1579. The Palace of the Grand Dukes, the National Museum, the Church Heritage Museum and the National Gallery of Art all sit within the same few streets, and the Gate of Dawn is a working pilgrimage site.

Two earlier capitals survive as sites instead of cities. Kernavė in the east is a complex of hillforts and an archaeological settlement, inscribed by UNESCO in 2004, and the medieval seat that Vilnius replaced. Trakai, west of the capital, keeps a castle on an island in Lake Galvė and sits inside Trakai Historical National Park, one of the country's five national parks.

Beyond those, the built record is thinly spread and administratively enormous: 35,814 cultural heritage objects stand under the protection of the Department of Cultural Heritage. Renaissance work survives at Kėdainiai in the centre of the country and at Biržai in the north, where the castle is a bastion fortification, and Medininkai near the Belarusian border keeps a castle of its own. Three points of the Struve Geodetic Arc, the nineteenth-century survey chain that UNESCO lists across ten countries, stand at Panemunėlis, Nemenčinė and Nemėžis.

Why Kaunas looks nothing like Vilnius

Kaunas held the capital between the wars and was built accordingly. Its modernist architecture is inscribed by UNESCO under the description Architecture of Optimism, covering the years 1919 to 1939, which is a fair account of a provincial city given a state to house inside twenty years. The city also carries Kaunas Fortress, the ring of forts thrown around it by the Russian Empire in the 19th century, along with the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum and the Vytautas the Great War Museum.

Twentieth-century military remains form a category of their own. The Plokštinė missile base in Samogitia, a Soviet nuclear launch site, stands inside Žemaitija National Park and is open to visitors. Grūtas Park gathers Soviet-era relics and statuary, including figures of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.

The cultural route named for Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, the composer and painter who lived from 1875 to 1911, opened in 2019 and links the places he worked in: Varėna, Druskininkai, Kaunas, Vilnius, Plungė, Rietavas and Palanga. It belongs to a family of themed routes. The domestic equivalent is the pažintinis takas, the marked interpretive path, laid out by national parks and municipalities through a piece of country with its own history attached, and it is what most Lithuanian day trips actually consist of.

How pilgrims made a hill out of crosses

The Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai is the best-known site in the country and it has no architecture at all. Thousands of Latin crosses stand on a low mound, each one carried there and planted by hand, and the mound was bulldozed in 1961 without the practice stopping.

Cross-crafting itself is on the UNESCO Representative List, proclaimed in 2001 and inscribed in 2008. The crosses are carved oak between one and five metres tall, usually roofed with a small shingled cap and cut with floral or geometric decoration, and many carry small statues of the Virgin Mary or of saints called on by people in distress. They are raised at roadsides, at the entrances to villages, beside monuments and in cemeteries, and what is left at them includes food, rosaries, money, and coloured scarves or aprons asking for fertility. In a village the cross is also a meeting place.

The craft is taught nowhere formally and passes on outside the school system. Parishes maintain the crosses, and UNESCO records rural depopulation as the main threat to the practice. The crosses became a marker of national and religious identity after the country was absorbed into the Russian Empire in the 19th century, and that role hardened under Soviet rule, when they were officially banned.

The other pilgrimage sites cluster in Samogitia, at Žemaičių Kalvarija and Šiluva, with the Gate of Dawn in Vilnius the exception. Roman Catholics were 79% of the population at the 2001 census.

Where the lakes and forests take over

East of Vilnius, and again across the north, the country turns to water. There are 2,833 lakes larger than one hectare and about 1,600 smaller ponds, most of them in the east, and 758 rivers longer than 10 kilometres. The longest is the Nemunas at 917 kilometres, which rises in Belarus and reaches the sea through its own delta. Forest covers 32.8% of the country, principally pine, spruce and birch.

The protected estate is correspondingly large. There are 1,160 protected cultural and natural areas, of which five are national parks, 30 are regional parks and six are strict reserves. Aukštaitija in the north-east is lake country, Dzūkija in the south is forest, Žemaitija covers the Samogitian uplands, Kuršių Nerija is the spit and Trakai Historical is the fifth.

Birdwatching concentrates in three places: the Nemunas Delta Regional Park, the Žuvintas biosphere reserve and Ventė Cape, where an ornithological station and a museum sit on the migration path. European bison are kept at the Krekenava regional park in central Lithuania.

Foraging is a season of its own. Varėna in the southern forests calls itself the mushroom capital, on the strength of the woods around it, and runs an annual mushroom festival with picking contests. The same forests carry berries, and both are staples of the domestic table.

Cycling is how much of this gets joined up. Three EuroVelo routes cross the country, EV10, EV11 and EV13, and the national network runs to 3,769 kilometres of track, of which 1,988 kilometres is asphalt. The named routes are the seaside route along the coast, the Nemunas river route and the Suvalkija circuit. Hot air ballooning operates over Vilnius and Trakai. Agrotourism, which here means staying on a working farm, has become a substantial part of the domestic market.

The open-air museum at Rumšiškės sets out complete farmsteads from the five ethnographic regions, Dzūkija, Žemaitija, Aukštaitija, Suvalkija and Lithuania Minor, which is the quickest way to see how the country divides itself internally.

What arriving in Lithuania actually involves

Lithuania joined the European Union on 1 May 2004 and the Schengen Area on 21 December 2007, and the currency is the euro. Arrival from Latvia or Poland involves no border check. The frontier with Belarus, 680 kilometres of it, and the 227 kilometres facing the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia are external European Union borders and a separate proposition. The Polish border is only 91 kilometres long and carries heavy international traffic across it. The emergency number is 112, traffic drives on the right, and sockets take the Europlug and Schuko patterns at 220 volts.

Who comes and where they come from

Foreign visits ran to 1.7 million in 2018, counting business, family and leisure together. Accommodation establishments recorded 3.25 million tourists in 2017, 6.2% more than in 2016, and hotels took 2.2 million of them. Hotel room occupancy stood at 54.3% in 2017 against 51.7% the year before, and bed occupancy at 41.4% against 39.7%, which is what a short season looks like in an annual average. Foreign visitors come mainly from Germany, Poland, Russia, Latvia, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Estonia and Finland.

Domestic travel is the larger half of the market. 70% of Lithuanians took their holidays inside the country in 2018, and domestic tourism grew by 12% that year. That is the traffic the statutory resorts were built to hold.

Why a guide has to be licensed

Guiding is a regulated profession. Where a tour has a guide interpreting the cultural and natural heritage of an area, Lithuanian law requires that guide to hold a licence, on a definition that follows the European standard for tour guiding published by CEN. Licensed guides are the only professionals permitted to conduct tours in all sites and museums within a city, and local authorities decide where a licensed guide is mandatory. A national guides database lists them by the languages they work in.

Tourist information centres operate in the major cities, in smaller towns and in the national parks, and they are the practical channel for both the licensed guides and the marked paths.