Things to Do in Riga in April

A private walking tour through Riga with a local guide who shapes the route around your interests rather than a fixed itinerary. The path moves through the medieval lanes of Old Town, past the soaring brick nave of St. Peter's Church and the carved cat sculptures perched defiantly atop the Cat House on Meistaru iela, then into the quieter residential blocks of the Art Nouveau district, where grotesque stone masks, screaming faces, and sinuous ironwork layer across entire building facades. Your guide fills in what the architecture alone cannot tell you, the Soviet decades, the Singing Revolution, and the small daily rituals that define life in Riga now.

This full-day excursion pulls you out of Riga and across the Latvian countryside, covering ground that would take days to manage independently. The route threads through Jūrmala, where a wooden boardwalk crosses pale sand dunes to the Baltic shore and the salt wind off the gray sea stings your face. From there it continues to the raised peat bogs of Ķemeri National Park, where boardwalks float above amber-tinted water between carpets of sphagnum moss, and on to Kuldīga, a quiet town on the Venta River whose centerpiece is Ventas Rumba, the widest natural waterfall in Europe, water sheeting over a dolomite ledge that stretches nearly 250 meters across. Stops along the way introduce the earthy, sour, smoked flavors of Latvian cooking: hemp butter, smoked eel, and the dense sourdough rye that Latvians treat as something closer to sacrament than bread.

Paddling through Riga by kayak reveals a city most visitors never see from pavement level. The route follows the city canal, the tree-lined waterway curving through the park belt where Riga's medieval fortifications once stood, and opens onto the wide, tidal Daugava River, where the Old Town skyline rises directly ahead: the dark spire of St. Peter's, the pale walls of Riga Cathedral, and the copper-green dome of the Nativity of Christ Cathedral doubling in the water's surface. From a kayak's low vantage, the scale of the city shifts entirely. Buildings tower. Bridges arc overhead close enough to touch their stone undersides. The hum of traffic fades to the rhythmic slap of paddle against cold water.

Riga International Airport sits roughly ten kilometers southwest of the Old Town, and this private transfer eliminates the guesswork of navigating an unfamiliar transit system after landing. A driver meets you at arrivals and handles the route into the center, which threads through Riga's outer residential neighborhoods, rows of wooden houses from the tsarist era painted in faded blues and greens, their gingerbread trim weathered to silver, giving way to the denser stone buildings of the Quiet Centre. For families or groups traveling with luggage, the value is straightforward: door to door, no wrestling bags onto tram platforms at the end of a long flight.

The overland route from Riga to Vilnius covers roughly 300 kilometers of Baltic countryside, and this sightseeing transfer turns dead transit into a day of discovery. The road passes through the gentle hills and dense pine forests of southern Latvia and northern Lithuania, with stops that would be difficult to reach independently. Rundāle Palace, standing alone in flat Zemgale farmland, opens its gilded White Hall and painted ceilings to morning light that pours through tall windows, a baroque extravagance built for a Duke of Courland, smelling faintly of old plaster and wax-polished floors. Later, the Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai strikes a completely different chord: tens of thousands of crucifixes, rosaries, and hand-carved wooden crosses cover a low mound in an open field, the accumulated devotion of generations producing a silence that feels weighted and deliberate. You arrive in Vilnius having absorbed a cross-section of the region rather than the view from a bus window.

The Great Ķemeri Bog is a raised peat bog roughly 40 kilometers west of Riga, accessible by wooden boardwalks that wind through a landscape stripped to its absolute essentials, dark pools of tannin-stained water, pale sphagnum moss rolling in low hummocks, stunted dwarf pines no taller than a person, and a silence so complete you can hear the creak of the planks under your own weight. The optional sunrise departure adds a dimension that midday visits cannot approach: mist lifts off the bog pools in the pre-dawn cold, the sky shifts from iron gray through copper to rose, and the whole flat expanse glows before the sun clears the distant tree line. The Jūrmala extension afterward brings you to the Baltic coast, where the long white-sand beach stretches for kilometers and the sharp salt air snaps you awake after the meditative quiet of the bog.