Gauja

Gauja was Latvia's first national park, declared in 1973 around the country's defining valley: the Gauja river cutting a wide, wooded trench through Devonian sandstone laid down when this was the bed of a tropical sea. The rock shows everywhere — red and ochre cliffs like Zvārtes iezis and the Ērgļu walls rising straight from the water, and caves worn into the soft stone, including Gūtmaņala, the largest in the Baltics, its walls carved with names back to the seventeenth century.

The valley was a frontier long before it was a park. Medieval Livonia fortified it thoroughly: the Turaida brick castle on its hilltop, the crusader ruins at Sigulda, and the walled complex at Cēsis are all inside park bounds, connected by a river that once separated bishops from swordbrothers. Between them lie quieter things — the Līgatne paper-mill village with its cellar caves, wooded ravines, and some of Latvia's richest broadleaf forest.

What's worth knowing before you go

Sigulda is the practical gateway — an hour from Riga by frequent train — and its cluster (castle ruins, Turaida across the valley, Gūtmaņala between them) makes a full day on foot. Cēsis deserves its own. For the landscape rather than the monuments, canoe: multi-day paddles from Cēsis or Līgatne down to Sigulda pass under the biggest cliffs, with riverside campsites spaced a day apart.

Trails are well marked but the valley sides are genuinely steep; autumn colour in early October is the postcard season and the crowds know it. Midweek in May, with the bird ravines in full voice, is the connoisseur's window.