A weekend in Riga and Jūrmala

Riga's Old Town is compact, fifteen minutes to cross, but the layers run deep. The House of the Blackheads was rebuilt from rubble in 1999 on the original fourteenth-century footprint, and the result is startling. The Dome Cathedral holds the fourth largest organ in Europe; if the timing works we sit in on a weekday recital before dinner.

Jūrmala is a 30 km chain of villages along the Gulf of Riga, the imperial summer capital since 1814. The wooden villas are an architectural tradition of their own: carved verandas, painted shutters, a vocabulary of turned porch posts. The sand is fine and white, the water is warm in August, and the pines come right down to the dunes. Bring a book.

Inga has been on Alberta iela in every weather and every light. She shows you the buildings the guidebooks skip: Eižens Laube's national romantic facades on Brīvības iela, the vertical Art Nouveau on Tērbatas, and Mežaparks, the forest park, where Latvian bourgeois summer dachas became year-round houses. The garden suburb is a quieter relative of Hampstead Garden Suburb in London, with a far shorter history.