Beaches in Latvia

Five hundred kilometres of Baltic shore, almost all of it pale sand backed by pine, and amber washes up along the whole of it after storms — the reason this coast was trading with Rome two thousand years ago. The Gulf of Riga is shallow and calm and warms into the low twenties in July; the open coast north of Ventspils is windier and cooler, and the difference is large enough to choose between. Jūrmala, twenty minutes from the capital, was the most fashionable resort in the Soviet Union, and its wooden dacha architecture survives along a pine-backed strand under a protection order. Cape Kolka, where the Gulf of Riga meets the open Baltic, has two sets of waves meeting visibly offshore, and the coast north of it belongs to the Livonian villages, the last speakers of a Finnic language now effectively gone. The old Soviet closed zone along parts of this shore is the reason so much of it is undeveloped: access was restricted for decades and the pine forest stayed. Practically: the season is late June to August and short, the sand is walkable for kilometres without a building, and the beaches nearest Riga fill at weekends while an hour further out they do not. Blue Flag beaches carry lifeguards in season; most of the coast does not.