Slītere

Slītere occupies the very tip of Kurzeme, where the Gulf of Riga meets the open Baltic at Cape Kolka — a bare finger of sand and swash running out toward the lighthouse island offshore. Behind the beach the land climbs the Slītere Blue Hills, which are not hills at all but the abandoned shoreline cliff of the Baltic Ice Lake, marooned in forest kilometres from today's sea. Between the old coast and the new lies a rare corrugated landscape of dune ridges and wet inter-dune hollows — kangari and vigas in Livonian — striped with bog and black alder.

The protection here is old: a natural monument was set aside below the Blue Hills in 1923, and the national park followed in 2000. The human story is the Livonian Coast — a string of fishing villages (Mazirbe, Košrags, Vaide) that are the homeland of the Livonians, the small Finnic people whose language coloured Latvian itself; Mazirbe's community house is the nation's gathering point.

What's worth knowing before you go

Cape Kolka is the obligatory stop, and best out of season: in spring it funnels one of the great bird migrations of northern Europe, with tens of thousands of passerines and waterbirds streaming past the point on a good April morning. The Pēterezers nature trail walks the dune-and-hollow lattice; the Šlītere lighthouse trail descends the old sea cliff through linden and ash forest that feels almost southern.

Facilities are sparse by design — Kolka village has the shops, Dundaga the castle and beds. Swimming at the cape demands respect: currents where the seas meet are no joke. Come for emptiness; even in July the beaches hold more swans than people.