Ķemeri

Ķemeri, declared in 1997, protects the wet country just inland of Jūrmala's beach strip: the Great Ķemeri Bog, black-alder swamp forest, shallow lagoon lakes, and the sulphurous groundwater that made the place famous long before it was a park. Rain falling on the bog filters through peat and gypsum for decades and surfaces smelling of struck matches — the springs fed a celebrated spa town from the 1830s, whose park, pavilions, and grand white hotel still stand in various states of restoration at the forest edge.

The bog itself is the main event: a raised dome of peat five thousand years in the making, patterned with pools and pine dwarfs, home to breeding cranes and wood sandpipers and, in passage seasons, a corridor of raptors. Lake Kaņieris, a reed-fringed remnant of an ancient lagoon, adds tern rafts and one of Latvia's best wetland bird lists.

What's worth knowing before you go

The Great Ķemeri Bog boardwalk is among the best-loved walks in Latvia: a figure-of-eight on planks, the long loop about three and a half kilometres, with a viewing tower over the pool maze. Go at dawn or towards sunset — the light is the whole point, and the tour buses come at midday. The barefoot-unfriendly truth: there is no shade and no water on the bog; carry both.

Trains from Riga stop at Ķemeri town, a forty-minute walk or short taxi from the trailhead. Round out the day with the sulphur spring pavilion in the old resort park and the Kaņieris lakeside birding tower.