[ ITINERARY · THE DISPATCH ]

48 Hours in Riga: Art Nouveau Overload and the Baltics' Boldest Market

Two days in Riga: a whole district of jaw-dropping Art Nouveau facades, a food market built inside old Zeppelin hangars, and a shot of black balsam that'll wake your ancestors. Here's the weekend, done right.

Riga snuck up on me. I’d booked 48 hours in Riga itinerary-style basically as a layover that got out of hand — a cheap flight, a free weekend — and I came home telling everyone it was the most underrated city break in Europe. Two days is the sweet spot: enough to fall for it, not so long that you run out of things that aren’t repeats.

Here’s the weekend.

Start in Vecrīga, the old town, while it’s quiet. It’s compact, cobbled, a bit Hanseatic-fairy-tale, and most of it you can cover on foot before the day-trippers arrive. Hit the House of the Blackheads (a wildly ornate guild house, rebuilt after the war, candy-box Gothic), the Dome Cathedral, and the strange trio of medieval houses called the Three Brothers, the oldest of which dates to around 1490. Grab a coffee on the square. Don’t overthink it — the joy of the old town is just drifting.

Now the main event. Walk north into the Centrs (the so-called “new town”) and find Alberta iela. This one street is the reason architecture people lose their minds about Riga: the city has the highest concentration of Art Nouveau buildings in the world, around a third of the centre is built in the style, and Alberta iela is the showpiece. Stone faces wail down at you from above doorways, sphinxes flank entrances, peacocks and masks and impossible flowing curves cover every surface. A lot of it is the work of Mikhail Eisenstein (yes, the film director Sergei’s father). Crane your neck. Don’t trip on the kerb like I did.

For dinner, find somewhere doing modern Latvian — grey peas with bacon, beetroot everything, rye bread that’s almost black and faintly sweet. And then, the rite of passage: a shot of Rīgas Melnais Balzams, black balsam. It’s a 45%, near-medicinal herbal liqueur that tastes like a forest floor argued with a cough syrup. Locals drop it in coffee or hot blackcurrant to make it survivable. I did three. I regret nothing and also everything.

Today is a food day, and it’s my favourite Riga thing by a mile.

Walk down behind the old town to the Rīgas Centrāltirgus, the Central Market. Here’s the kicker: it’s housed inside five enormous old German Zeppelin hangars — vast arched halls built in the 1920s to store airships, now repurposed into one of the largest markets in Europe. Each pavilion has a theme — meat, fish, dairy, veg, gastronomy. The fish hall alone is a smoked-eel wonderland.

Go hungry. Buy smoked fish by weight, fresh bread, a wedge of caraway cheese, a bag of the tiny wild strawberries if they’re in season. Eat it on a bench by the canal. It costs almost nothing and it’s better than most restaurant lunches. The market’s a bit gritty round the edges, and that’s the point — this is where the city actually shops, not a tourist food court.

After lunch, walk it off. Cross the Daugava river on the footpath, or climb something for the view — the Latvian Academy of Sciences has a viewing platform on a Stalin-era tower (the “Stalin’s Birthday Cake,” locals call it) that gives you the whole sweep of the city, hangars and church spires and all.

If you want one more church, the St Peter’s tower has a lift up its spire for a more central panorama. And if it’s a warm evening, the parks along the city canal are gorgeous, with little rowboats and the Freedom Monument standing guard over the lot.

Last night, go back for one more balsam. Or don’t. (Do.)

Two days, and Riga had completely won me over — gorgeous, slightly raw, very cheap, and nothing like the city I’d half-expected. The Baltics get lumped together a lot, and they shouldn’t. Riga has its own loud, ornate, slightly mad personality, and it deserves a proper weekend, not a layover.

Go for the facades, stay for the fish — and let someone else have the third balsam.

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