Things to Do in Riga in March

strips away the script that most walking tours follow and replaces it with the texture of lived knowledge. Your guide steers you through the narrow lanes behind the Dome Cathedral, where the echo of your footsteps off damp cobblestones is the loudest sound, then into courtyards tucked behind Art Nouveau facades on Alberta iela, places where the carved stone faces of nymphs and grotesques stare down from five stories up, their features softened by a century of Baltic weather. The route bends around what interests you: Soviet-era architectural scars, the cinnamon-and-cardamom warmth spilling from a Georgian bakery in the Quiet Centre, or the story behind a particular bullet-pocked wall on Stabu iela.

puts you on the city's waterways at paddle level, where Riga looks entirely different than it does from any bridge or embankment. From a kayak on the City Canal you glide beneath stone footbridges draped in bare branches, the water black and still, reflecting the pastel yellows and greens of the park-facing buildings along Bastejkalna. When the route opens onto the Daugava, the scale shifts, the river is wide and muscular here, and the skyline of Old Town rises on your right like a model city, every spire and roofline sharp against the sky. The slap of your paddle and the faint diesel smell off a passing barge are the only interruptions.

takes you an hour west of Riga into one of Europe's largest raised bogs, a landscape so flat and open it feels like standing on the surface of another planet. A wooden boardwalk threads across spongy, copper-coloured sphagnum moss, past dark bog pools that reflect the sky like polished obsidian. In March, the edges of these pools may still carry thin crusts of ice that crack and tinkle as temperatures climb past freezing in the late morning. The air smells of cold peat and wet pine, and the silence is so complete you can hear a woodpecker drumming from hundreds of metres away. If you opt for the sunrise departure, the bog at dawn is extraordinary, mist hovering at knee height, the light shifting from iron grey to pale rose across a horizon with no vertical interruption.

covers the roughly ten kilometres between Riga International Airport and the city centre in a vehicle waiting at arrivals with your name on a sign, no fumbling with taxi apps in an unfamiliar alphabet, no standing at a bus stop in sub-zero wind chill with luggage. The driver meets you landside, handles your bags, and delivers you to your hotel door. For groups up to eight, the per-person arithmetic makes this competitive with public transport while eliminating the dragging-a-suitcase-through-slush factor entirely.

turns a five-hour intercity journey into a rolling day trip through the southern Latvian and northern Lithuanian countryside. Rather than staring at the ceiling of a bus, you stop at places most travellers blow past entirely, the hilltop ruins of Bauska Castle, where the wind howls through roofless chambers and you can smell damp stone and frozen earth. The ornate Baroque curves of Rundāle Palace, Latvia's answer to Versailles, set improbably in flat farmland. And the Hill of Crosses outside Šiauliai, where thousands of crucifixes planted in a low mound create a visual density that is eerie and moving at once, their metal arms clinking faintly in the breeze. You arrive in Vilnius by evening, luggage already in the vehicle, with three genuine sights under your belt instead of a blank transit day.

puts you at a torch flame in a small Riga studio, melting rods of coloured glass into beads, pendants, or rings under the guidance of a working glass artist. The heat from the burner is immediate and welcome, you feel it on your face and hands the moment you lean in, and the glass itself shifts through startling colours as it softens: a rod that looks slate-grey at room temperature blooms into deep cobalt under the flame, then cools to something between teal and midnight. The smell of heated glass is faintly metallic, clean, nothing like smoke. You leave with a finished piece that carries the slight irregularities of handmade work, a bubble frozen mid-rise, a twist that catches light differently at each angle.