From Riga: Sigulda, Cēsis & Gauja National Park Tour

Three medieval castles in a single day from Riga, one explored by candlelight with a lantern in hand. Turaida, Cēsis, Sigulda, Gauja National Park, and dark rye warm from the baker.
Three medieval castles in a single day from Riga — and at one of them you walk the towers by candlelight with a lantern in your hand instead of under museum lighting. I don't know anywhere else in Europe where you can still do that. It's the day trip I'd send my own friends on if they wanted to see the Latvia that lives outside Riga.

Ten hours, door to door, small group of up to fifteen guests. We leave central Riga at 8:30 in the morning and have you back by early evening. Air-conditioned minibus, entrance to Cēsis, Sigulda, and Turaida castles, an artisan bread maker visit with tasting, and a licensed Latvian guide for the full day, all included. Lunch is pre-arranged at a local cafeteria in Cēsis — hearty traditional food at local prices, and you order and pay yourself so you get exactly what you want.

We drive east for about 90 minutes, watching flat plains give way to rolling hills and pine forest. Our first stop is an artisan bread maker who still bakes dark rye the old way, and yes, you taste it warm from the oven. Dark rye in Latvia is closer to a religion than a bakery product. Latvians eat it with butter, with cheese, with herring, and — in one of the more surprising moves — as a dessert with whipped cream and lingonberry jam. Every grandmother has an opinion about who makes it right.

From there we walk into Cēsis Old Town and its 13th-century Livonian Order castle, where the candlelit section takes you through medieval corridors by hand-held lantern. We break for lunch at a local cafeteria, then head into Gauja National Park — Latvia's largest and oldest national park. The afternoon covers the ruins of Sigulda Castle and its New Castle museum, and the red-brick Turaida Castle looking out over the Gauja river valley from its hillside. The view from Turaida tower in the late afternoon, when the valley fills with shadow and the canopy turns amber, is the quiet highlight of the day. Most groups rush through it. Don't.

The final stop is a photography vantage point over the Gauja River Valley — the view that earned this landscape its "Switzerland of Latvia" nickname. Then we drive you back to Riga by early evening with a head full of castles and a Latvia most visitors never bother to find.

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