Latvia’s summer delights: white-sand beaches, historic hotels — and a night of solstice revelry

“You can’t sleep tonight,” a fellow reveller nudges me, as if she’s noticed my head drooping beneath its enormous wreath of buttercups and cornflowers. “Latvians don’t sleep during Jāņi.”

It’s after midnight, and I’m on a beach near the hamlet of Jurkalne on the Kurzeme coast of Latvia. Alongside hundreds of others, I’m celebrating the summer solstice, the first of four nights of national revelry known as Jāņi.

Pronounced “yarny”, it is Latvia’s most anticipated and riotously celebrated annual event, during which city dwellers head to the country, deck bodies, cars and houses with foliage and flowers, then take part in centuries-old customs. No ticket is needed, just a crown of greenery — wild flowers for women, oak leaves for men.

On this first night of celebrations, I have danced and sung with costumed Latvians, consumed local beer and Jāņi cheese, a special midsummer concoction of milk, eggs, butter and caraway seeds. But fire is the crucial element in Jāņi rituals, believed to ward off evil while also preserving the might of the sun in readiness for the long Latvian winter.

We gaze up at fires flaring from four-metre-high pedestals bedecked with flowers. We toss ceremonial gifts — bread, cheese, last year’s carefully preserved wreaths — into the flames while chanting līgo, folk-song refrains so simple that even I can master them. We cheer as flaming cartwheels are hurled from the clifftops into the Baltic Sea (at precisely the moment the sun dips into the ocean). Later, a contraption resembling a windmill is set alight, its burning “arms” turned, via a huge handle, by a succession of muscled, shirtless men on ladders. If they turn the handle quickly enough, the four flaming arms create a spinning wheel of fire.

When dawn breaks at 4am, the festivities change: naked racing for men, skinny-dipping for anyone who fancies it. Women take dew baths — either lying naked in the grass, or else trailing a linen shawl through the fields, collecting and preserving the healing properties of dawn dew for the year to come. Sleep is not allowed. According to pagan superstition, those who nod off risk a year of incurable fatigue.

Latvians stopped practising a multi-god, nature-oriented paganism only in the 12th century, when German crusaders arrived and forced them to adopt Christianity, making them (along with Lithuanians) the last Europeans to convert. Jāņi was then blended with John the Baptist’s feast day (June 24), resulting in a four-day hybrid celebration. It was banned during some of the Soviet era, but many Latvians continued to celebrate in secret. Today, Jāņi is back with a vengeance, charged with a sense of pride in Latvia’s independence, a sentiment amplified by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Jāņi isn’t the only surprise of my month-long visit to Latvia. The country’s coast is a revelation too: 500km of little-developed shoreline, clean white sands, dunes rolling into pristine pine forests, abandoned Soviet-era watchtowers, giant boulders, even the odd sculpture.

Most of the coast lies in the west Latvian region of Kurzeme (historically known in English as Courland) and yet, despite being less than an hour’s journey from the capital Riga, few visitors make the trip. This might soon change: the port of Liepāja, Latvia’s third-largest city, has been selected as one of Europe’s two Capitals of Culture for 2027. As I strolled its cobbled streets of fading art nouveau architecture, and hiked its miles of empty windswept beaches, I wondered if perhaps Liepāja could start to draw summer visitors who would otherwise flock to the Med. The growing interest in “coolcations” can only help: while much of Europe has begun July enduring heatwaves, Liepāja has this week enjoyed clear sunny skies, but temperatures only just above 20C.

And yet there’s something else that visitors are missing. Latvia is chock-full of country estates — manor houses, palaces and stately homes. Many of these muižas are in ruins but a growing number are being painstakingly restored, thanks to EU funding, government subsidies and the newly deepened pockets of Latvian entrepreneurs. These exquisite muižas have finally started opening their grand, baronial doors, either as hotels, private rentals or Airbnbs. Better yet, they are surprisingly inexpensive.  

These places don’t pop up on the usual internet booking sites. When someone mentioned Kukšu Manor (now a 10-room hotel, near the town of Kandava), I struggled to find it online. A few days later, I arrive there unsure — after perusing its rudimentary (prices-free) website — what to expect. But as I wander the rooms, my jaw drops. Above me are ceilings painted in ultramarine blue and scattered with golden flowers. Every door, architrave and wall has been delicately painted with frescoes, stencils or murals. Even the cornicing in what is now the breakfast room has been thickly carved with baskets of fruit. Original tiled stoves, abundant stags’ heads, ornate chandeliers and antique furniture complete the look. The bedrooms are equally dramatic, so that — for a few moments — I feel as though I have stepped back into the time of the Baltic-German barons who built these houses.

Daniel Jahn bought this fairytale muiža for $18,000 in 1999 with no idea what lay beneath the 10 layers of Soviet-era paint. “It took three years to remove all the paint, and then we came to wallpaper and beneath that were layers of German newspaper,” he says. “The muiža had been a post office, telephone exchange, potato storage depot . . . It had no water or electricity. But the newspaper preserved the 1720s frescoes.”

Latvia once had more than 1,800 muižas — more than any of its Baltic or Nordic neighbours. Around 1,200 still exist, with a large proportion in Kurzeme, thanks to those zealously crusading Germans who — from the 13th century onwards — took a shine to this lushly green region. Over the next few centuries, they built prolifically, taking inspiration from gothic, baroque, romantic, classical and neoclassical styles.

Unlike Kukšu Manor, the walls of Nurmuižas Pils (outside Talsi) weren’t protected by layers of newspaper. It’s also a considerably larger place: I feel as though I’m entering a medieval village. To the sound of frogs croaking from the old fish ponds and storks clattering their beaks from the tops of pine trees, I walk the cobblestone paths (leave the stilettos at home) that run between the vineyard, the herb gardens and potagers, the wild swimming lake and the 30 outbuildings. Previously barns, dairies, laundries and bakeries, they are now tastefully converted into event spaces, a spa and a 22-bedroom hotel.

At the reception, I ask about the black smears all over the whitewashed walls. “They are the original smoke stains from the open fire,” says the owner, banker Oleg Fils. “My wife wanted everything smooth and even, but I wanted history to tell its story.” So the stone walls have been restored but not plastered over. The original brick floors are uneven. Fragments of exposed fresco can be glimpsed alongside fresh paintwork. It’s a different sort of restoration altogether. And there are Soviet-era buildings within sight — grimy, aerated concrete blocks, corrugated roofs — lest anyone dare forget the past.

As I toured more and more muižas, I realised that what I loved most were the layers of still-visible history. About 400 of them were burnt by socialist revolutionaries in 1905, the remainder slowly returning to Latvian control either after independence (1918) or following the 1939 repatriation of Germans. Many of the houses were converted to hospitals, museums or schools, then during the Soviet era (1944-1990) some became collective farms, pig houses, tractor repair centres or workers’ apartments.

There are more than 100 roofless muižas still languishing in Kurzeme but Roberts Grinbergs, president of the Latvian Castles and Manors Association, is optimistic: “After 30 years, Latvians are finally seeing muižas as their cultural heritage.” He tells me of a Baltic-German descendent who recently returned over a thousand historical items to their once-ancestral home. Grinbergs envisages a Loire-style “château” route attracting both domestic and international visitors.

After the maximalist restoration of Kukšu Manor, and the stylishly simple renovations of Nurmuižas Pils, I decide to visit Padure Manor, near the Unesco-listed town of Kuldiga, which offers guests a very different experience. I’d seen pictures of this grandiose house online, the only muiža in Kurzeme to boast an immense columned portico at both its front and its rear, and the only muiža not created by a Baltic-German baron (Padure was built by a Scottish merchant, John Balfour, in the 1830s).  

I approach the house up a long, elegant drive of ancient lime trees, to find its famous porticos painted a daffodil yellow and romantically crumbling. Padure is atmospheric, dusty, only partially restored. Here guests can lie in bed and peer at 1850s frescoes and Victorian-era wallpaper through peeling paint. Original doors groan on their (original) rusty hinges. Centuries-old floorboards squeak beneath chipped Soviet paint.  

“I want guests to taste history, in all its guises,” says owner Jānis Lazdāns, who bought the house at auction and has spent 18 years raising money for the restoration, including via crowdfunding and share ownership schemes, as well as renting it out for film shoots. Upstairs, the owner shows me the musty contents of a Soviet municipal library, arranged on 1960s shelving. “It came with the house,” he says. 

This strange, beguiling swirl of decay and modernity, hope and despair, reverent renovation and romantic ruin — pressed up against eerily abandoned Soviet buildings — is all part of Kurzeme’s appeal. 

Jāņi didn’t end on June 21. I had another long night to go. Indeed, the most intimate festivities are typically saved for June 23 when friends and family gather around fires, drink beer, eat cheese (yes, more) and stay up all night (again), often venturing into forests to look for a mythical “fern flower”. In the past, fires were lit on every hilltop so that all of Latvia was symbolically joined by fire. 

Two Latvian friends invited me to join them on a hilltop, where we made a fire and listened to tales of Latvia, its turbulent history, folk stories, songs and pagan rituals. Back home, when friends ask me what I thought of the country, I can’t find the right words. Instead I mumble, “Lord of the Rings meets Downton Abbey.” Ridiculous, of course, but I think they get the idea.

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