Jūrmala

Jūrmala began as a string of fishing villages on the sandy strip between the Gulf of Riga and the Lielupe. Its life as a resort started in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when wealthy landowners began spending summers by the sea and Russian army officers came to rest after the Napoleonic Wars, returning later with their families. In German the shore was known as the Rigasche Strand and advertised as part of the Baltic Riviera. At Ķemeri, mineral springs known for their curative properties from 1796 led to the founding of a spa resort in 1838.

The opening of the Riga–Tukums railway in 1877, which still runs through the town, brought a great increase in visitors. Villas, guesthouses and sanatoriums spread along the line, drawing on the sea breeze, the pine woods, the mineral springs and the mud baths. A Jewish community formed in Bulduri, Dubulti and Majori from the late 19th century; in July 1941, shortly after the German invasion, the Bulduri synagogue was set on fire with people inside.

In 1959 the resorts were separated from Riga and merged with Sloka and Ķemeri to form the City of Jūrmala. In the Soviet decades it was a favourite holiday place for senior Communist Party officials, among them Brezhnev and Khrushchev, and holidays here were handed out as rewards; concrete hotels and high-rise blocks went up beside the wooden villas. After 1991 some of the Soviet buildings fell into disrepair, while restored villas, spas and summer festivals brought visitors back.

The town's identity is its architecture: wooden houses from the 19th and first half of the 20th century, many in Art Nouveau style, built mostly by Baltic German and Latvian architects. Jūrmala has an official list of 414 protected historical buildings and more than 4,000 wooden structures, and a few railway stations, among them Lielupe, Pumpuri, Melluži, Vaivari and Sloka, keep their old wooden buildings.

Music fills the summer. The Dzintari concert hall, which grew from an outdoor stage of 1878 and gained an indoor hall in 1936, hosts concerts through the season, and since 2015 the singer Laima Vaikule has organised the Rendezvous festival there. From the early 2000s the town hosted New Wave, a contest for young pop singers; in July the Jomas Street Festival and the Fishermen's Festival are the traditional highlights.

Sport follows the water and the sand: beach football and volleyball at Dubulti and Dzintari, kite surfing and windsurfing at Pumpuri, and rowing, sailing and waterskiing on the Lielupe. The Baltic Open, a WTA tennis tournament, was played at Lielupe in July 2019. Many Russian celebrities and businessmen have bought houses near the beach, and the summer festivals draw larger crowds each year.

About 52,000 people lived in Jūrmala in 2024, making it Latvia's fifth-largest city. The population rose quickly after the Second World War with the building of apartment blocks in Kauguri and Dubulti, reached 61,000 in 1979, and has since fallen with low birth rates and emigration. Kauguri, in the west, has the town's largest concentration of Soviet-era high-rise blocks, while the eastern districts are mostly wooden houses and villas among the pines.

The economy is tourism and health: hotels, spas, sanatoriums, restaurants and the summer trade on Jomas iela. The town's rhythm follows the seasons sharply. In July and August the beaches, trains and streets are full and residents of Riga arrive for weekends; in winter many summer houses stand empty, in some winters the gulf freezes over, and life shrinks to the year-round neighbourhoods. The beach stays in use all year: it is equipped with playgrounds, benches, football pitches and volleyball courts, walkers look for pieces of amber washed up in spring and autumn, and in January 2012 the town hosted the Winter Swimming World Championships.

Jūrmala grew from fishing villages, and smoked fish belongs to that coastal heritage. The open-air museum's fishing homestead keeps a fish smokehouse beside the house and sauna, and smoked fish goes with dark rye bread, rupjmaize, made from coarse rye flour, malt and caraway seeds.

The cafés and restaurants of Jomas iela and the beach serve the usual Latvian repertoire. Cottage cheese, biezpiens, comes with boiled potatoes, lightly salted herring, spring onions and sour cream; potato pancakes are served with smoked salmon and sour cream; and in summer cold borscht, made with kefir or soured milk, boiled beets, cucumber, radish, egg and herbs, is a favourite on warm days. Speķrauši, buns filled with finely cut streaky bacon and onion, are a popular Latvian pastry.

Beer is the most consumed alcoholic drink in Latvia, with a growing craft scene, and kvass, brewed from fermented rye bread, remains popular. Riga Black Balsam, a bitter herbal liqueur, is often called the national drink.