Riga's Art Nouveau, a whole quarter of it

In most European cities, Art Nouveau is something you go looking for: a metro entrance here, a shopfront there, a single villa by an architect with a museum devoted to him. In Riga it is simply the city. Walk a few minutes north of the medieval old town, past the canal and the parks, and you are in a grid of broad streets lined with apartment blocks in the style: faces, masks, peacocks, lions, sunflowers and women with flowing hair, on facade after facade. More than a third of the buildings in Riga's central district are Art Nouveau, and the city has a claim to the greatest concentration of them anywhere.

How it happened

At the turn of the twentieth century Riga was booming. It was one of the busiest ports of the Russian Empire, its industries were growing, and its population was rising fast. The old fortifications had come down in the mid-nineteenth century, and the new city spread out across the land beyond them in a planned grid of boulevards. It needed apartment houses, offices and shops, and it needed them at exactly the moment when Art Nouveau, Jugendstil as it was known here, was the fashion of the day.

So the new quarter was built almost entirely in the new style, in the space of little more than a decade, by a generation of architects many of whom had trained at Riga's own polytechnic. Then the First World War came, the boom ended, and the quarter was left very much as it was, a city of the 1900s preserved more or less complete. In 1997 the Historic Centre of Riga, including the old town and this quarter, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Alberta iela

The street everyone comes to see is Alberta iela, Albert Street, a short street in the Quiet Centre where some of the most extravagant facades in Riga stand side by side. Five of the most decorated are by Mikhail Eisenstein, a civil engineer who designed a run of buildings on and near the street between 1901 and 1906. They are theatrical to the point of excess: huge staring masks, screaming faces, sphinxes, lions and lunging figures, windows of every shape, and tiers of decoration stacked up to the sky. He was also the father of Sergei Eisenstein, the film director, who was born in Riga, and it is hard not to see something cinematic in his father's facades.

Opposite and alongside them, in a quieter vein, are buildings by other architects. One of them houses the Riga Art Nouveau Museum, in an apartment restored to its original state, from the stencilled walls to the furniture and the kitchen; its spiral staircase, painted in deep colours, is worth seeing on its own.

National Romanticism

Not all of Riga's Art Nouveau is so theatrical. Running alongside it was a Latvian style, National Romanticism, which looked to the countryside rather than the theatre: steep roofs, rough stone, heavy timber, folk motifs and natural materials, in buildings that seem to have grown out of the ground. Latvian architects, working at a time when Latvia was still a province of the Russian Empire, used it to say something about who they were. Look for it on the streets around Alberta iela and in the quarter beyond, among the masks and peacocks.

Walking the quarter

The best way to see it is simply to walk, with your head up. Start at Alberta iela, then wander the streets around it: Elizabetes iela, Strēlnieku iela, Antonijas iela. Most of the buildings are private apartments and offices, so you see them from the street, but that is where the decoration was meant to be seen. Early morning and late afternoon, when the low sun rakes across the facades, are the best times. And do not forget the old town, ten minutes away, with its merchants' houses, guild halls and church spires, which is the reason the city was there to boom in the first place.

Riga is the middle of the three Baltic capitals, and most holidays that stop here go on to Tallinn and Vilnius too.

Just You's nine-night Baltic Treasures: Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania, for solo travellers, runs from Tallinn to Riga, Turaida and Sigulda, then to Liepāja and Kuldīga on the Latvian coast, and into Lithuania for Klaipėda, Nida, Vilnius and the Hill of Crosses.

Explore's seven-night Walk Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania walks through Lahemaa National Park, Altja and Viljandi in Estonia, then Cēsis and the Gauja National Park, Eagle's Cliff and Sigulda in Latvia, before reaching Riga, Ķemeri National Park and Jūrmala, and finishing at Klaipėda. It runs in May, June, July and September.

Travelsphere's nine-night Grand Baltic Explorer comes from Helsinki and Tallinn, with Turaida Castle, Sigulda, Riga and Rundāle Palace, before continuing through Lithuania to Warsaw.

Wherever you start, give Riga at least one full day, and spend half of it outside the old town. The masks on Alberta iela have been staring down at the street for more than a century. They deserve to be looked back at.