Riga, the capital of Latvia, is the largest city in the Baltic states, founded in 1201 by the German bishop Albert of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava River. It quickly became a major Hanseatic League trading city, and its wealth over the following centuries - under German, Polish, Swedish and Russian rule in turn - shaped an Old Town dense with merchant houses, guild halls and church spires, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Riga's most striking architectural legacy, however, dates from around 1900: it holds one of the largest and finest collections of Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) buildings in the world, concentrated especially in the streets around Alberta iela, with elaborate façades of mythological figures, mascarons and ornamental ironwork. Rebuilt after severe damage in both World Wars and after decades as a major industrial centre of the Soviet Union, Riga today combines its medieval core, its Art Nouveau quarter and a large, green, modern city around them - a scale that comes as a surprise after the small towns further north.

Cape Kolka, at the northern tip of Latvia's Kurzeme peninsula, marks the point where the sheltered Gulf of Riga meets the open Baltic Sea. The two bodies of water carry different currents, temperatures and sediment, and on a calm day the meeting line between them is sometimes visible as a faint seam running out from the cape.
This stretch of coast, known as the Livonian Coast, was historically home to the Livonians - a Finnic people related to Estonians rather than the Baltic-language-speaking Latvians and Lithuanians around them. Livonian fishing villages once lined this shore for centuries, but the community was devastated by the World Wars and Soviet-era restrictions on the coastal border zone; today only a handful of native speakers remain, alongside cultural revival efforts and villages that still carry Livonian names.

Irbene, deep in the forests of northern Latvia, was built by the Soviet military in the 1960s–70s as a signals intelligence station, codenamed "Zvyozdochka" (Little Star), intended to intercept Western satellite and radio communications. Its large radio dishes - now 32 and 16 metres across, with an 8-metre dish nearby - made it one of the most technically advanced Soviet listening posts outside Russia itself, and the surrounding settlement housed the military personnel and their families in secrecy, absent from Soviet maps.
When Russian forces withdrew from newly independent Latvia in 1994, the retreating troops destroyed much of the site's sensitive equipment, but the huge dishes survived. They were handed over to the Latvian Academy of Sciences and converted to civilian use, and Irbene now operates as the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre, used for radio astronomy research and as part of the international LOFAR network of low-frequency radio telescopes. The former military town around it, once home to over a thousand people, is now largely abandoned - a rare, slightly eerie combination of Cold War ruin and working scientific observatory.

Liepāja, Latvia's third-largest city, grew around one of the few ice-free ports on the eastern Baltic, which made it strategically valuable long before it became a tourist destination. Under Tsarist Russia it was developed into a major naval base, a role continued and expanded by the Soviet Union after 1945: the Karosta district became a large closed military port, and Liepāja itself was designated a "closed city," off-limits to foreigners and even most Soviet citizens without a special permit, until 1991.
Since independence, Liepāja has reinvented itself as a centre for music and alternative culture - locally nicknamed "the city where the wind is born" after a well-known Latvian song - alongside its role as a working port and industrial city. The old Karosta naval base, with its abandoned barracks, a Soviet-era prison now open to visitors, and the ruined Orthodox Naval Cathedral, remains one of the most striking reminders of the city's military past.