Latvia travel tips

Latvia travel health

Required is not recommended: the first is what the border asks about, the second is what a clinic would suggest. Both, for Latvia, then the number to dial and what care costs a visitor. Applies to every guide in Latvia: Riga, Jūrmala, Sigulda, Kuldīga, Cēsis, Liepāja.

Required to enter

Nothing. No vaccination certificate is asked for at the border.

Recommended

  • Tick-borne encephalitis for forest walks from spring to autumn
  • Routine vaccinations up to date

Emergency number

112

Care for visitors

Good and affordable

EU/EEA and Swiss visitors are treated on the same terms as residents with an EHIC or GHIC card; UK visitors use a GHIC. Everyone else pays, and travel insurance is worth having for the repatriation cover rather than the treatment. Good in Riga, where the private clinics are quick and speak English; adequate in the towns. The state system is stretched but works with an EHIC.

Ticks from spring to autumn in the Gauja forests and the long grass; encephalitis is present and the vaccine is worth it for a walking trip. Ice on the pavements in winter. The sea has rips in a west wind.

The general rules — clinic timing, water, mosquitoes, insurance — are in travel health tips.

The guides in Latvia

The Freedom Monument and the Art Nouveau streets of Riga from aboveRigaLatviaThe biggest Art Nouveau city in the world with a Hanseatic old town inside it, a market in five zeppelin hangars, and a beach twenty minutes away by trainThe flat Baltic shore at Jūrmala, sea, reeds and a line of forestJūrmalaLatviaThirty kilometres of white sand under pines, wooden villas from the tsars’ time, and Riga half an hour away by trainTuraida castle’s red-brick tower among the forest of the Gauja valleySiguldaLatviaThe Gauja valley: three castles, a cable car across the river, a bobsleigh track you can ride, caves with medieval graffiti and the country’s autumn colourThe old brick bridge across the Venta at KuldīgaKuldīgaLatviaA small town of wooden houses on the widest waterfall in Europe, where the fish jump the falls in spring and the brick bridge is the longest of its kindThe tower of Cēsis castle with its orange roof above the forestCēsisLatviaThe prettiest small town in Latvia: a Livonian castle you explore by lantern, a medieval centre, a beer brewed since 1590 and the Gauja forest around itConcrete of the Northern Forts at Karosta, Liepāja, with a wind turbine behindLiepājaLatviaThe city where the wind is born: a long white beach, a Soviet naval base you can sleep in the prison of, Art Nouveau streets and the country’s rock music