Jūrmala Beach

Jūrmala is a string of villages along a sand spit between the Gulf of Riga and the Lielupe river, twenty minutes by train from central Riga. The beach runs twenty-four kilometres without interruption.

It was the resort of the Soviet elite. Jūrmala had been a spa town since the nineteenth century, but from the 1950s it became the place party officials, writers and performers holidayed; sanatoria were built along the shore, and the summer song contests broadcast from here were watched across the union. The wooden dacha architecture — carved verandas, towers, fretwork — survives in quantity and is protected, and it is the most interesting thing about walking the town.

The sea is shallow, brackish and calm, warming to the high teens or low twenties in summer. Water quality in the gulf has been a live issue for decades and is now monitored and generally good, with Blue Flag status at several sections. Amber washes up after autumn storms. The town is not one place but a chain of some fifteen villages along the spit, each with its own station on the Riga line, and Majori and Dzintari are the two that most visitors mean.

Development is a low resort town of hotels, spas and restored wooden houses, with a pine forest behind the dune. Cars entering the town pay a daily charge, which keeps the density down. Amber, spa water and the pine forest are what the town has always sold, and the order of importance has changed with each political era. The Dzintari forest park behind the beach has a wooden observation tower and a path system through the pine that is used year-round.

Twenty-four kilometres of white sand behind four hundred protected wooden dachas, and the resort the Soviet elite used — sanatoria, song contests, the whole apparatus. Twenty minutes from Riga by train, a daily charge for cars, and amber along the tideline after autumn storms. The Baltic is warm for about eight weeks.