The Baltic Heartland

Latvia is a good starting point for any combination trip that includes one of the two neighboring countries. No other airport in the region is as easily accessible as Riga, which is even connected to several Nordic provincial airports. From Riga there are only 300 km to each of the other two capitals.

Latvia is the center of the Baltic States and lies between Estonia and Lithuania. With almost 65,000 square kilometer, the country is half a time larger than Denmark and with only about 2 million inhabitants also sparsely populated.The people of the Baltics are all very different, but Latvians have something in common with both of their neighbors: With the Lithuanians, they are linguistically and ethnically closely related, and their cultural roots have much in common. On the other hand, until 1918 three quarters of Latvia shared history with the Estonians in the north: They were subjected to the same foreign powers, the same German upper class, and got the same Lutheran church. Hence, on the surface Latvia has many similarities with Estonia although languages and mentality are very different.