The Old Town on footRiga Old Town walking tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5from $18
Over the border and backHill of Crosses & Jelgava Highlights★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0from $54
Lunch at the Central MarketLatvian food tasting tour at Riga Central market★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5from $45Riga’s Old Town is one morning. The bogs, the palaces and the Hill of Crosses are the rest.
Riga is small enough to walk and cheap enough to eat well in, so the money goes on getting out of it. Every tour you can book in Latvia, with what it costs and how much of the day it takes.
- 108
- tours to book
- $5
- cheapest way in
- 22
- days under $50
Everything worth seeing in Latvia is within three hours of Riga.
The country is flat, small and easy to cross, which is why almost every tour here starts and ends at the same handful of Riga pickup points. Five directions, what each one costs to join, and what you actually get out of the drive.
The most-booked day out
2 countries! Hill of Crosses, Rundale Palace and Bauska castle
★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · from $157
Sigulda and the GaujaCastle ruins on both banks, a cable car over the valley, forest the colour of rust in October.
The Hill of CrossesFour hours south and over the Lithuanian border, for a mound with a hundred thousand crosses on it.
Kemeri bog and JurmalaA boardwalk out over black bog pools at sunrise, then pine, sand and wooden villas at the coast.
Rundale and BauskaRastrelli built the palace for a duke before he built the Winter Palace. The gilded rooms still look it.
KuldigaThe widest waterfall in Europe, a long brick bridge, and a town that kept its wooden houses.
All 12 whole-day trips from Riga →
What travellers in Riga book before anything else.
Every Latvian tour review →The tours more people take than anything else in the country, and what each one costs to join.
1
Riga Old Town walking tour
Review of Riga Old Town walking tour, with stops, guide quality, group size, value, meeting point, and practical booking advice.
From · $18
Read our review →
2
Latvian food tasting tour at Riga Central market
from $45
3
2 countries! Hill of Crosses, Rundale Palace and Bauska castle
from $157
4
Discover Riga Bike Tour
from $47
5
Hill of Crosses & Jelgava Highlights
from $54
6
Riga Gun Range: shooting with Winchester, Glock17, & Kalashnikov
from $67
7
Best of Riga Walking Tour – Highlights and Hidden Gems
from $154
8
Riga Old Town Walking Tour in a Small Group
from $23
Riga fits inside a twenty-minute walk, and rewards a slow one.
The medieval core, the wooden suburb across the canal and the art nouveau streets north of it are all one continuous walk. These are the three most-taken versions of it, and the market hall lunch that most people bolt on.
In a Riga midwinter the light is gone by four, so the day starts indoors.
December gives this city about six usable hours, and the bogs, castles and river valleys go quiet with it. The centre does not. The market halls, the balsam cellars, the Soviet-era rooms and the art nouveau stairwells are all weatherproof, and a shooting range is indoors by definition. Book the outdoor day for the middle of the day, and put everything else around it.
What a day in Latvia actually costs.
Every tour on the site sorted by price. Riga is one of the cheapest capitals in the EU to eat and walk around in, and the numbers below show where that stops being true.
The self-guided audio walks, the canal boat, a market lunch and the Old Town on foot. A capital city morning for the price of a main course.
- 1Riga Old Town walking tourfrom $18
- 2Latvian food tasting tour at Riga Central marketfrom $45
- 3Discover Riga Bike Tourfrom $47
The standard day out: a group run to the Hill of Crosses, the Sigulda castles, the Kemeri boardwalk at sunrise, a bike tour of the whole city.
Private drivers, the long cross-border days, and the palace-and-castle combinations that swallow the whole of one day.
Riga’s stone faces, a bog at sunrise, and a hill in the next country.
Old towns and castles are everywhere in this part of Europe. A street of screaming faces carved in plaster, a peat dome you can walk out into, and a hill that has been growing crosses for two hundred years are not.
The Screaming Faces
About a third of the buildings in central Riga are art nouveau, which is more than any other city in Europe holds. Alberta iela is where it turns theatrical: Mikhail Eisenstein covered the facades with sphinxes, peacocks and enormous open-mouthed faces, and never designed a single interior behind them. The whole street is a frontage. Look up, and keep looking up.
- 1Riga Art Nouveau walking tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 27 reviews
- 2Old Town And Art Nouveau Walking Tour Of Riga★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 15 reviews
- 3Small Group Art Nouveau walking tour 2h★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 6 reviews
The Hill of Crosses
Nobody planted the first cross to start anything. People kept adding, Soviet bulldozers cleared the mound three times, and people kept adding overnight. There are well over a hundred thousand now, from crucifixes taller than a person down to rosaries hung on other crosses, and in any wind the whole hill ticks and rattles.
- 12 countries! Hill of Crosses, Rundale Palace and Bauska castle★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 225 reviews
- 2Hill of Crosses & Jelgava Highlights★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 149 reviews
- 35,5 Hour Small Group Tour to Hill of Crosses from Riga★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 127 reviews
The Great Kemeri Bog
The bog is a dome of peat that has been growing since the ice pulled back, and a boardwalk runs out across it to a tower. Sunrise is the reason to lose the lie-in: mist sits in the hollows between the pools, the stunted pines read as a scale model of a forest, and the good light lasts about twenty minutes before it goes ordinary.
- 1Best of Kemeri National Park In One Day★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 61 reviews
- 2Sunset at Kemeri National Park★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 38 reviews
- 3Sunrise at Kemeri National park + Jurmala★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 37 reviews
The newest Latvia tour reviews.
Latest into the list →
Riga’s Architecture: A self-guided audio tour of the city’s art nouveau history
Read our review →
Private Full-Day Hiking Tour in Sigulda and Gauja National Park
Read our review →
All Inclusive Honest History Tour – Āraiši, Cēsis, Līgatne, Sigulda
Read our review →
Road Trip to Cēsis, Līgatne, Āraiši and Sigulda – All Inclusive
Read our review →
Day trip to Gauja National Park: animals, castles and a cave
Read our review →