The three Baltic capitals — Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius — are compared to each other the way that sibling cities always are, each with its own identity and its own partisans and its own argument for why it is the most interesting of the three. Tallinn has the better-preserved medieval Old Town. Vilnius has the Baroque. Riga has something that neither of the others possesses in anything like the same quantity: Art Nouveau architecture. Riga contains the largest collection of Art Nouveau buildings in the world — approximately 800 buildings in the Art Nouveau style, concentrated in the Alberta iela and Elizabetes iela streets of the Central district but present throughout much of the city outside the medieval Old Town — and the quality and variety of what is there makes the Art Nouveau districts of Vienna and Brussels and Barcelona look, if not modest, then at least less overwhelmingly concentrated. This alone would make Riga worth the visit. But Riga also has a medieval Old Town of genuine quality, a Central Market in four repurposed Zeppelin hangars that is one of the largest and most extraordinary market spaces in Europe, a food scene that has developed from almost nothing twenty years ago into one of the most interesting in the Baltics, and a musical culture — the Latvian song festival tradition, the choral singing, the opera — that has been not merely a cultural expression but a political one, the means by which a small nation maintained its identity through fifty years of Soviet occupation and organised its way to independence in the Singing Revolution of 1987-1991. Riga is a city of about 600,000 people and it is significantly more interesting than that number suggests.

The Art Nouveau City: Why 800 Buildings Changes Everything

Riga’s Art Nouveau district was built between 1896 and 1913, during a period of extraordinary economic growth when the city was the largest port in the Russian Empire after Saint Petersburg and the wealth generated by that trade funded a building boom that hired the best architects of the era and gave them commissions to produce the most elaborate residential and commercial buildings that the style could produce. The Jugendstil (the German name for Art Nouveau, used in Riga because the city’s architectural culture was strongly German-influenced until the First World War) buildings of Riga are not all of the same character: the buildings designed by Mikhail Eisenstein (father of the film director Sergei Eisenstein) are the most extravagant — massive female figures emerging from the facades at upper storey level, elaborate masks and floral decorations covering every available surface, the whole composition executed with a theatrical excess that makes them the most photographed buildings in the city. The buildings of Konstantīns Pēkšēns and Eižens Laube are more restrained and more specifically Latvian in their decorative vocabulary — folk motifs and Baltic symbolism in the ornamental details, a more measured use of the Art Nouveau vocabulary that makes them arguably more interesting as architecture even if less immediately dramatic. Walking Alberta iela and Elizabetes iela in the morning, when the light catches the facade details and the street is quiet enough to look up without navigating pedestrian traffic, is the best single hour available in Riga: stand in front of 2a Alberta iela (Eisenstein, 1906) and look at the full composition of the facade, the figures and the masks and the window surrounds and the roofline ornamentation, and understand that this is what serious architectural ambition looked like in the Edwardian era when budgets were large and restraint was not considered a virtue.

The Old Town, the Central Market, and the City That Layers Its History

Riga’s Old Town (Vecrīga) is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the most historically complex part of the city: a medieval Hanseatic trading city that has been continuously inhabited since its foundation in 1201, its fabric layered with Gothic churches, Renaissance guild halls, Baroque palaces, and the peculiarly Latvian synthesis of all of these traditions that the city’s successive occupiers — German, Swedish, Russian, Soviet — left in its architecture. The Dome Cathedral (Rīgas Doms), the largest medieval church in the Baltics, contains an organ of 6,718 pipes installed in 1884 that was, at the time of installation, the largest organ in the world; the acoustics of the cathedral are such that organ concerts here are an experience that music lovers specifically travel to attend. The Three Brothers — three adjoining residential buildings from different centuries pressed together in a Riga alley, the oldest (built around 1490) the oldest residential building in the city — is the most concentrated summary of Old Town architectural history available in a single view. The House of the Blackheads, the guild hall of the Brotherhood of Blackheads (unmarried foreign merchants), is the most dramatic building in the Old Town: a Gothic-Renaissance facade of extraordinary elaboration, destroyed in the Second World War and Soviet era, reconstructed in 1999 to its 1334 original design, now functioning as a concert venue and museum. The Central Market — five Zeppelin hangars (the largest in the world when built in 1924) repurposed into market pavilions, where meat, fish, dairy, produce, and dry goods are sold in a space that is simultaneously Soviet-era infrastructure and living commercial culture — is one of the most extraordinary market buildings in Europe, and the smoked fish pavilion alone, with its Baltic herring and eel and flounder and the smoked ribs that are the Latvian street food equivalent of a hot dog, is worth the fifteen-minute walk from the Old Town.

The Food Scene, the Nightlife, and the New Riga

The Latvian food scene has developed dramatically since independence, and Riga’s restaurant culture is now the most interesting in the Baltics — with a specific focus on New Nordic-influenced Latvian cooking that takes the local larder (the wild mushrooms and berries of the Latvian forests, the Baltic fish, the rye bread, the smoked meats, the dairy of the Latvian countryside) and applies contemporary technique and presentation to produce something that is simultaneously ancient and current. Forager restaurants using foraged ingredients from the Latvian forests, fish restaurants working with Baltic cod and herring and flounder prepared with the clean, precise technique that the Nordic food influence has brought to the region, and craft beer bars where Latvian microbreweries produce beers flavoured with local ingredients — spruce tips, birch sap, rye, juniper — are the coordinates of the new Riga food culture, concentrated in the Quiet Centre (Klusais centrs) and the Miera iela neighbourhood that has become the city’s most creative district. The Miera iela street market, the Lido chain (the Latvian fast food concept — a cafeteria of traditional Latvian food: grey peas with smoked bacon, roast pork, Latvian bread soup, potato pancakes with sour cream — that is simultaneously the most affordable eating in Riga and a genuine expression of what Latvians actually eat), and the Berga bazārs (a beautifully restored 19th-century shopping passage now housing some of the city’s best independent food shops and cafés) provide three different entry points into Riga’s food culture at three very different price points. Riga’s nightlife is, among Baltic capitals, the most developed: the club scene of the Kalku iela area and the bar culture of the Old Town operate at a quality and a price point that draws visitors from across Northern Europe specifically for the weekend.

Riga is two hours by bus from Tallinn and two hours by bus or train from Vilnius, which makes it the natural centrepiece of a Baltic capitals trip — the city that the itinerary should spend the most time in rather than the one that gets squeezed between the other two. The Art Nouveau district alone justifies a day. The Old Town and the Central Market justify another. The food scene and the Miera iela neighbourhood justify a third. And the day trips — Jūrmala, the beach resort town 25 kilometres west of the city that was the Soviet elite’s summer playground and that has a fin-de-siècle wooden villa architecture of considerable beauty; Sigulda and the Gauja Valley, the forested gorge with its medieval castle ruins 50 kilometres east of the city — justify as many more as the itinerary allows. Go in summer for the white nights and the outdoor terraces. Go in December for the Christmas market in the Dome Square, one of the best in the Baltics. Just go.