Christmas in Riga

On arrival at Riga Airport (RIX), your chauffeur meets you and drives the short distance into the city to the Grand Hotel Kempinski, the restored nineteenth-century landmark facing the Freedom Monument. Once you have settled in, your private guide walks you the few minutes into the Old Town and out onto Dome Square, where for Advent the cathedral square is filled with wooden stalls, a tall lit tree, and the smell of mulled wine and smoked sausage. Riga's guild of Blackheads is said to have decorated the first Christmas tree here in 1510, a claim the city wears proudly, and your guide tells you the story over your first cup of glögi. A festive welcome dinner in the Old Town closes the evening, and the rest of the night is your own.

After breakfast your guide leads you along Alberta iela and Elizabetes iela, the heart of a UNESCO-listed quarter that holds the densest concentration of jugendstil facades anywhere in the world. The screaming masks and peacocks of Mihail Eisenstein's buildings read differently under a dusting of snow, the streets quieter than in high summer. At the Central Market, its halls set inside five former Zeppelin hangars on the Daugava, you taste your way through Latvian winter food: smoked fish, dark rye, farm cheese and a warming glass of Riga Black Balsam. In the evening you return to Dome Square and the House of the Blackheads for a second look at the market, mulled wine and piparkūkas, the spiced Latvian gingerbread, in hand.

After breakfast your chauffeur drives you northeast out of Riga into the Gauja valley, the wooded river gorge Latvians call their Switzerland, at its stillest under winter snow. At Sigulda you take a real run down the bobsled and luge track built for the Soviet Olympic team ahead of the 1988 Games and still open to visitors every winter, a wheeled or bobsled-style summer sled swapped for the ice-run in season: a genuinely different afternoon from another market square. Once you have your breath back, your guide walks you up to Turaida, the red-brick medieval castle rebuilt on its hilltop above the valley, for the wide winter view over the white gorge below. A long lunch in Sigulda rounds out the day before the drive back to Riga.

After breakfast your chauffeur drives you into Vidzeme, Latvia's rolling northeastern countryside, to Cēsis, one of the country's oldest towns and, unlike Riga, rarely troubled by coach parties even in Advent. Your guide walks you through the ruins of Cēsis Castle, a medieval stronghold of the Livonian Order handed to you with a candle lantern for the half-lit towers and cellars, then out to the town's own small Christmas market on the square below, wooden stalls and a modest tree standing in for Riga's grander version at a gentler pace. There is time for mulled wine, a slow walk through the old town's timber houses, and a long lunch before the drive back to Riga in the afternoon light.

Your last morning is unhurried: a final breakfast at the Kempinski, then a choice between a last loop of the Dome Square market, time to find gifts of Riga Black Balsam or amber before you go, or a quiet hour in the hotel spa out of the winter cold. When you are ready, your chauffeur drives you to Riga Airport (RIX) for your departure, the same guide and driver who met you five days before seeing you off.