Latvia · Old Town
Riga Old Town, street by street
A self-guided walking tour of the Riga Old Town, every street in one day.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Riga is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 14.0 km
- Time
- about 4 hours
- Streets
- 67
- Steps
- 3 streets with steps
- Start point
- Melngalvju nams
- Short on time
- Riga in one walk: 8 sights in a loop
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
How long does it take to walk Riga's Old Town?
About 4 hours at a stroll to cover all 67 streets, 14.0 km on foot, in one day.
Is Riga's Old Town walkable?
Yes. The Old Town of Riga is 67 streets and 14.0 km of walking end to end. 3 of them include a stretch of steps.
The Old Town
Map of the Riga Old Town: every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
Sights in Riga: what I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Melngalvju nams 1,500 points
The busiest front on Town Hall Square. There is so much on it that I lose count, and I have time to count. Someone once left this house a request in writing. Someone else, a long time later, did as it asked. I am not telling you what it said.
Rīgas Doms 500 points
The largest medieval church in the Baltics, on a square of its own. That is a lot of brick to chew. The real treat is inside, and it is louder than it looks. Go in and see.
Rīgas Pils 500 points
A castle that still has a tenant, and the tenant has an office. Long ago two birds argued over a spot on its roof, and the town took the outcome very seriously. Who won, and why it mattered, you hear at the castle.
Svētā Pētera baznīca 500 points
A lift takes you up the tower to a gallery 72 metres high, and the Old Town lies below like a laid table. Before you go up, look at what sits on the very top. It is not the first one. How many came before it, you hear up close.
Kaķu nams 250 points
Two cats sit on a roof on Līvu laukums, and they are not up there for the view. What they are up there for stands on the other side of the square. I am not telling you what.
Laimas pulkstenis 250 points
It went up to fix a very human problem. Then it picked up a sweet tooth and a second job. Stand under it on the hour and find out.
Pulvertornis 250 points
A stout round tower, built like me: thick in the middle and in no hurry. It was named after sand long before it was named after powder. Look closely at its walls. Something is lodged in them, and the usual explanation is not the right one. The right one is waiting for you at the tower.
Trīs brāļi 250 points
A row of houses on Mazā Pils iela, shoulder to shoulder like loaves on a bakery shelf. They are not the same age, and one of them wears a face for a reason. I am not telling you which one, or what the face is for.
Zviedru vārti 250 points
An archway with a house sitting on top of it, on the last standing stretch of the town wall. They say it exists because someone could not be bothered to walk around. I have never hurried anywhere, so I find this hard to follow. I am not telling you who it was.
Eating
What to eat in Riga: actual food.
Riga has no signature dish, and I stopped hunting for one. The list worth carrying is Latvia's. The country has put a handful of its foods under protected European names, and five of them make my list: a rye bread, a rye pie, a fresh cheese, a white butter and a large grey pea. Rye twice, milk twice, one pea. That is a pantry, not a menu, and I have always preferred a pantry.
Meat and fish
One, and it is a pea. None of the protected Latvian names on my list is a meat dish, and I will not invent one. The pie, the cheese, the butter and the bread are yours as well.
Latvijas lielie pelēkie zirņi
Latvia's large grey peas, protected as a designation of origin since 2015. The name is the whole description: Latvian, large, grey, peas. I have eaten my way through far less honest street names.
Ask what they are cooked with. The protection covers the pea, not what goes into the pot with it.
Sources: UK Government (Defra)
Vegetarian
Sklandrausis
A round pie on a rye base rolled two or three millimetres thin, the edges folded up. Boiled potato goes in first, carrot on top, and it comes out yellowy orange. Some get cream on top, or a pinch of cinnamon or caraway. It is sweet, sometimes very sweet, and it is eaten cold with tea or milk. Potato in a sweet pie. Nobody had to talk me into it.
Sources: UK Government (Defra)
Jāņu siers
A fresh cheese made from sour milk. Milk and curd are heated together, the whey is drained off, and then butter or cream, eggs, salt and caraway seeds go in. A cheese that borrowed an omelette's shopping list.
Sources: UK Government (Defra)
Rucavas baltais sviests
White butter from Rucava, with a protected geographical indication since 2018. The name, the place and the protection are what I know for certain. How it is churned I leave to Rucava.
Sources: UK Government (Defra)
Vegan
One, the bread. The pie and the cheese carry butter, cream or eggs, and the butter is butter. The grey peas may well qualify, but their protection describes the pea and not the pot, so they stay where they are.
Salinātā rudzu rupjmaize
Scalded rye bread. Part of the flour is scalded with hot water first, which makes it sweet. Then caraway and rye malt go in, and the dough rises on a natural leaven. After baking, the crust gets a coat of potato starch and water, and it comes out dark and glossy. Sweet and sour in one slice, and no sauce needed.
Ask for it by its full name, salinātā. That is the recipe the protection covers.
Sources: UK Government (Defra)
Checked 24 September 2026.
With kids
Riga with kids: short legs, big appetite.
The streets here are full of dots to collect, and a child on a hunt forgets to be tired. Here is a short loop for the smallest walkers.
- The loop
- Melngalvju nams, Rīgas Doms, Zviedru vārti, Svētā Pētera baznīca, and back to the start
- Distance
- 1.4 km
- Time
- about 30 minutes of walking at a child's pace (3 km/h)
- Steps
- no streets with steps on the loop
- Playgrounds
- 1 near the loop
- Public toilets
- 2 near the loop, 1 with a changing table
- Drinking water
- 1 near the loop
- Ice cream
- 1 near the loop
Near the loop means within 150 m of it, counted from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Name origin
Why it is called Riga.
Riga is named after a grain store, a threshing barn or a little river, depending on which linguist you ask. They have been arguing about it for a century. The Baltic theory says Semigallian ryggoz, a place to keep grain. The Slavic one says rija, a barn for drying grain before threshing. The German one says Riege, a place filled with water, after the Rīdzene stream the town grew up beside. The name first turns up in writing in Henry of Livonia's chronicle, in the 13th century: ad locum Rige, at the place of Riga. Two theories about grain, one about water. I have made up my mind. It is bread.
Sources: web.archive.org; de.wikipedia.org
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
A small river, the Rīga, ran into the Daugava here and made a natural harbour, right where the trade routes crossed. By the second half of the 12th century this was the economic centre of the whole lower Daugava. The town itself was put together at the river mouth by joining two older settlements. Where trade routes cross, the food comes to you. I like the principle.
Sources: www.rigamuz.lv; medievalheritage.eu
Why then
When the first stone went down.
1201, the year Bishop Albert made Riga his residence. That is the year the city counts from. The first fortifications went up from 1208, and by 1215 a new part of town was already growing outside the walls. Fourteen years from a bishop's house to a town too big for its wall. Fast, by my standards. Most things are.
Sources: www.rigamuz.lv; web.archive.org; medievalheritage.eu
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1201–1581
The Bishops of Riga, archbishops from 1255, and the Livonian Order were the overlords, and the city council worked in between. By the late 13th century Riga was a Hansa town and an important centre of the transit trade. Two landlords over one small town. I do not even share a pebble.
Sources: www.rigamuz.lv
- 1581–1621
When Livonia came apart in the early 1580s, Riga went to the Polish king Stephen Báthory and spent about four decades as part of the Polish-Lithuanian state.
Sources: www.rigamuz.lv; www2.mfa.gov.lv
- 1621–1710
King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden took Riga in 1621, and the city stayed under the Swedish crown for almost a hundred years. In that time it became the mightiest fortress on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. A fortress is a pantry with very thick walls. I approve of pantries.
Sources: www.rigamuz.lv; www2.mfa.gov.lv; de.wikipedia.org
- 1710–1918
In 1710 Riga passed to Russia, and the city became the administrative centre of the province of Vidzeme in the Russian Empire. It stayed that way for two centuries. I have napped longer.
Sources: www.rigamuz.lv; www2.mfa.gov.lv; de.wikipedia.org
- 1918–
The independent Republic of Latvia was proclaimed on 18 November 1918, and Riga was its leading city from the start, even if capital status only became official in 1931. On 4 May 1990 Latvia declared the renewal of its independence, and on 21 August 1991 it was fully independent of the Soviet Union. Thirteen years to make the obvious official. I respect a slow decision.
Sources: www.rigamuz.lv; www2.mfa.gov.lv; de.wikipedia.org
The emblem
What the shield means.
A silver shield with an open gate between two towers: the town's right to govern itself. Under the raised grate sits a golden lion's head. Above the gate, two crossed black keys, St Peter's, stand for the patronage of the Pope, and above them a golden cross and a golden crown stand for the bishop the town answered to. An open gate is the friendliest thing a coat of arms can show. I take it as an invitation to dinner.
Sources: web.archive.org; web.archive.org
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The Rīdzene, the little river the town grew up beside, widened into a pond about 50 metres across in the 13th century, right where 13. janvāra iela runs today. The street is dry now. I looked for fish anyway.
Sources: web.archive.org
A short stretch of the medieval town wall still stands in the courtyard behind St John's Church, next to the former Dominican friary, with its outer face turned to Kalēju iela. Almost all the rest is gone. This piece stayed out of sight behind a church, which I respect as a survival plan.
Sources: medievalheritage.eu
At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries the whole walled town fitted inside a circuit of about 2200 metres: some 22 hectares. A whole Hanseatic city on a patch I could graze in an afternoon.
Sources: medievalheritage.eu
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- iela
- Street. It comes after the name: Kalēju iela, Mazā Pils iela. You will read it on every corner of the Old Town, and to me every one of them is a course.
- laukums
- Square. Doma laukums, Līvu laukums, and glued straight onto the name in Rātslaukums, Town Hall Square.
- Vecrīga
- Old Riga: the Old Town, and the whole of this level.
- kanāls
- Canal. Pilsētas kanāls, the city canal, follows the old moat line and closes off the Old Town to the east.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Riga in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 67streets
- 725dots
- 11.7km of street
- 14.0km on foot
- 4hours at a stroll
76% of the streets here, by length, are cobbles or setts: number 5 of 59 Old Towns measured.
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
Use this map in your article or blog: free, with a credit link.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.