Jūrmala

The train from Riga takes twenty-three minutes and deposits you in Majori, which is Jūrmala’s main strip and the version the tourist brochures show. But the Jūrmala I fell for was found by walking twenty minutes in either direction from the station, past the ice cream stands and the amber jewelry shops, into streets where the wooden villas sat behind birch trees and the smell of pine resin came on the sea breeze in concentrated pulses. This is Jūrmala at its best: a twenty-kilometre stretch of Baltic coast where a century of seasonal life has accumulated in the form of carved wooden architecture, sandy paths between pines, and the particular texture of a resort town that was once famous and no longer needs to be.

The villas are the thing. They were built by Riga’s wealthy German, Russian, and Latvian bourgeoisie between the 1880s and the 1930s, each one a wood-and-paint declaration of summer prosperity. The carved porches, the towers, the ornate window surrounds — all of it in timber, most of it needing paint, all of it somehow more beautiful for the peeling. Some have been renovated into guesthouses, small hotels, and family restaurants. Many remain private and slightly shabby. A few stand empty, their gardens gone to tall grass, which gives the streets a quality somewhere between resort and ruin that I found completely compelling. Soviet-era sanatoriums occupy some of the grander sites — hulking brutalist volumes that were built to replace the bourgeois villas as the new form of collective leisure, and which now exist in various states of reclamation, abandonment, or awkward conversion.

The beach is long, flat, and pale — fine Baltic sand backed by a dune ridge and then the pine forest that gives this coast its particular smell. In summer the water is cold enough to be invigorating and shallow enough for long wading. On the morning I visited in late September the beach was almost empty, a line of footprints in the sand heading toward Dubulti, the water a flat grey-green that matched the overcast sky precisely. A man was flying a kite. Two women were walking fast and talking faster. The silence between wave surges was complete.

Majori’s main pedestrian street has the cafes and restaurants you’d expect from a resort town, but the cooking is better than you’d anticipate. I had a lunch of smoked fish and boiled potatoes with dill, washed down with a glass of local kvass that tasted like fermented bread and autumn sunshine in equal measure. Afterward, I found a bakery doing the dark rye bread that Latvia does better than anywhere I know — bought half a loaf, ate it in slices walking back toward the beach, and watched a family of swans in the Lielupe River, which separates Jūrmala from the mainland, doing whatever swans do when nobody is performing for them. In summer the town fills with visitors from Riga, Baltic weekenders, and European tourists discovering the pine-and-sea combination for the first time. In September it belongs almost entirely to itself — and to the people from Riga who have been coming here every August for forty years and see no reason to stop.

When to go: June through August for swimming and the full summer atmosphere, with long Baltic evenings when the light over the sea stays golden until ten. Late September strips the crowds away and gives you the pine smell, the empty beach, and the wooden villas in their most quietly beautiful form. Avoid January through March unless the melancholy of an out-of-season Baltic resort is specifically what you are looking for, which is a valid mood.