Beaches in Lithuania

Ninety kilometres of Baltic coast, and half of it is the Curonian Spit — a sand bar shared with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, inscribed by UNESCO as a cultural landscape because it exists only through two centuries of deliberate forestry. Dunes here buried at least fourteen villages after forest clearance destabilised them in the eighteenth century, and one dune is still moving. The replanting that stopped the rest is why the spit is there at all, which makes it one of very few beaches in the register that is openly a piece of engineering. Nida, the main village, was a German artists' colony before the war and Thomas Mann's summer house stands above it. The mainland coast at Palanga is the country's resort, with a long wooden pier, a botanical park and an amber museum in a former manor. The sea is brackish, shallow and cold; the season runs about eight weeks from early July; and amber washes up along the whole shore after storms, which is the reason this coast was trading with Rome two thousand years ago. Klaipėda, the only Lithuanian port, sits at the northern gap in the spit. Practically: ferries cross from Klaipėda in a few minutes and carry the only vehicles permitted on the spit, there is an entry charge for cars, cycling is the sensible way to move along it, and the border with Kaliningrad closes the southern half to ordinary travel.