Visit Liepāja

A taste of Liepāja

Liepāja is Latvia's underrated third city, a windswept Baltic port that earned itself the nickname 'the city where the wind is born' (łvis Slīk's 1972 song made it stick). Sitting on a narrow strip of land between the Baltic Sea and Lake Liepāja, it has one of the country's longest white-sand beaches — the wide Baltic Beach is a Blue Flag stretch with the famous wooden Promenade snaking along its dunes. The Old Town is a mix of carefully preserved wooden 19th-century houses (around 1,500 of them are heritage-protected) and Soviet-era apartment blocks; the iconic Holy Trinity Cathedral (1758) has the largest non-electric pipe organ in the world, once played by Wagner himself when he conducted at the Liepāja Opera. Don't miss the haunting Karōsta district 7km north — a former secret Soviet naval base, completely closed to the outside world until 1991, with vast fortifications crumbling into the sea, the Orthodox St Nicholas Cathedral, and the eerie Karōsta Prison (you can actually book a night in a cell, on a guided 'Behind Bars' experience). Liepāja was an unofficial capital of independence-era Latvia in 1919, has a serious rock-and-metal scene (the country's biggest open-air rock festival, Summer Sound, runs here every August), and is the closest big city to the magical Cape Kolka where the Gulf of Riga meets the open Baltic.