Baltic Beauty; Riga

RIGA is the undisputed Baltic metropolis, a major port and industrial centre of nearly a million people. The city was founded by Albert von Buxhoeveden, a German canon who arrived in 1201 with twenty shiploads of crusaders to convert the Latvian tribes to Christianity. The main Hanseatic outpost in the region,

Riga was run by German nobles and merchants even when wider political control passed to other powers, starting with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late sixteenth century. After a subsequent period of Swedish rule Riga became part of the Russian Empire in 1710 and during the second half of the nineteenth century it developed into a major manufacturing centre. Badly damaged during World War I, the city made a comeback during the first Latvian independence and remained a major centre after the country was swallowed up by the Soviet Union in 1940. Under the Soviets, the influx of Russian immigrants reduced the Latvians to a minority in their own capital - forty-seven percent of the city's population is now Russian, with a further sixteen percent made up of other non-Latvian nationalities. These days Riga has a boom-town feel with a small but conspicuous section of the population making big bucks from the get-rich-quick opportunities thrown up by the switch to full-blown market economics.

Eating and drinking
You can eat very well in Riga's restaurants, but at a price. If you're on a budget, many bars and cafés do food that is less expensive and often just as good as restaurant dishes. There are also plenty of inexpensive fast-food places. Many places have English-language menus. For drinking , most of the Old Town bars, particularly those around Cathedral Square, tend to be expensive and geared towards tourists and the local nouveaux riches. A number of cheaper and more off-beat places can be found in the New Town. The majority of locals can't afford Riga bar prices so they buy beer from kiosks and wander the streets clutching bottles.

The boulevards of the New Town , rolling east from Old Riga, bear witness to a period of rapid urban expansion that began in 1857, when the city's medieval walls were demolished, and lasted right up until World War I. As Riga grew into a major industrial centre and country-dwellers flocked to the city, four- and five-storey apartment buildings - many of them decorated with extravagant Jugendstil motifs - were erected to house the expanding middle class.

Jugendstil architectural embellishments - florid stucco swirls surrounding doorways, stylized human faces incorporated into facades, and towers fancifully placed on top of buildings - can be seen on virtually every street of the New Town and, while walking through the area, it always pays to look up to catch details that might otherwise pass by unnoticed. One of the most famous Jugendstil creations in the city is at Elizabetes 10a and 10b , an apartment building adorned with plaster flourishes and gargoyles, and topped by two vast impassive faces. It was designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, the architect father of Sergei, director of the film Battleship Potemkin ; more of Eisenstein's creations can be seen a block north of here at Alberta iela 2, 2a, 4, 6, 8 and 13.

At the core of Old Riga (Vecriga) is Cathedral Square (Doma laukums), edged by government offices and a sprinkling of cafés, and dominated by the red-brick Riga Cathedral (Rigas Dome; Tues 11am-6pm, Wed-Fri 1-6pm, Sat 10am-2pm; 0.50Ls), a towering agglomeration of Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque architecture. The cathedral was established in 1211 by Albert von Buxhoeveden, the founder of Riga, who became its first bishop. In true Lutheran style the interior is relatively unadorned, the most eye-catching features being a florid pulpit from 1641 and a magnificent nineteenth-century organ with 6768 pipes. The pillars of the nave are decorated with carved coats of arms while its walls are lined with German memorial slabs, mostly dating from the period after the Reformation.

The east wing of the cathedral was once a monastery but now houses the Riga Museum of History and Navigation (Rigas vestures un kugniecibas muzejs), Palasta 4 (Wed-Sun 10am-5pm; 1Ls). The ground floor has pictures, maps and postcards of Old Riga, while the first floor has ship models and nautical ephemera. Of more general interest is the display on Jugendstil Riga and the section on Riga between the wars. The next floor houses archeological finds, with the usual array of weapons and tools enlivened by the remains of a longboat hauled out of the Daugava.