Latgale: Daugavpils, Aglona and the Lakes

Today your driver-guide collects you from your Riga hotel or the airport in the morning and takes the A6 east along the Daugava, about three and a half hours to Daugavpils with a coffee stop on the way. After lunch the afternoon is at the Mark Rothko Art Centre, which opened in 2013 in the fortress's 1833 artillery arsenal. Rothko was born in the city in 1903 as Marcus Rothkowitz, and original paintings lent by his children hang here permanently, in a low-lit room where nobody hurries you. Afterwards you walk the fortress itself, begun in 1810 as Napoleon's invasion approached and still lived in: ten streets of barracks and officers' houses that keep their historic names. Your guide drops you at Park Hotel Latgola in the centre, and dinner is at a restaurant a short walk away.

Today starts on Church Hill, where your driver-guide takes you after breakfast. Four confessions stand within a few hundred metres of each other: the Lutheran cathedral of 1893, the Catholic church and the Orthodox cathedral of Saints Boris and Gleb, both from 1905, and the Old Believers' church of 1928, one of the largest in Latvia. The Old Believers broke with the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century and settled in Latgale from the 1660s. When the community has the door open, the interior is icons from floor to ceiling, and your guide explains what they kept that the rest of Orthodoxy changed. Mid-morning the car heads upriver along the Daugava bends, where the river still keeps its natural course, to Krāslava, about forty-five kilometres east. The town grew up around the Plater family estate: you walk the manor park above the river and visit St Ludwig's Church, finished in 1767 with frescoes by the Italian painter Filippo Castaldi. You are back in Daugavpils by late afternoon. The evening is your own, with our shortlist for dinner, and a second night at Park Hotel Latgola.

Today your driver-guide collects you after breakfast for the drive north to Aglona, about forty-five minutes. The basilica stands in the open between two lakes: late baroque, built between 1768 and 1800, with two towers of about sixty metres, and the only minor basilica in Latvia. On 15 August it fills with pilgrims; on most days the grounds are wide and quiet, and the seventeenth-century icon of Our Lady of Aglona hangs at the high altar. From Aglona the road runs east into Rāzna National Park. Lake Rāzna holds more water than any other lake in Latvia, and the place to see it from is Mākoņkalns, a steep hill with the remains of a thirteenth-century Livonian Order castle on top and a viewing platform reached by steep steps. Lunch is near the lake. In the afternoon you stop at Lūznava Manor, an Art Nouveau house built between 1905 and 1911 for the railway engineer Stanislav Kerbedz and reopened in 2015 after restoration, with a park and changing exhibitions. Rēzekne is twenty minutes on, and your guide drops you at Kolonna Hotel by the river, where dinner is included. If GORS, the Embassy of Latgale, has a concert that evening, we book seats for you; the hall is a few minutes' walk away.

Today begins in Rēzekne at the Latgale Culture and History Museum, which holds the largest permanent display of Latgalian ceramics in the world: candlesticks, jugs and the green and brown glazes the region is known for. Latgalian pottery is on the Latvian Cultural Canon, and it is still made by hand in the countryside around the town. Late in the morning your driver-guide takes you to a potter's workshop nearby, booked ahead, where you watch a piece go from the wheel to the wood-fired kiln and can try the wheel yourself. Finished pieces are for sale, and they wrap them for the flight. After lunch the road heads north-west to Lake Lubāns, the largest lake in Latvia by area, flat, reedy and good for birds, where a short trail on footbridges at Teirumnīki leads out over the marsh. From there it is about three hours to Riga, and your driver drops you at your hotel or the airport in the early evening.