This compact part of the city is easily walkable and you may find yourself face to face with a soaring cathedral that has survived since the Middle Ages or a restored medieval warehouse that now houses a swish nightclub or a swanky boutique. 

Surprises await around every corner in this delightful section of the Latvian capital.   

While the charming city is noted for its wonderfully restored Old Town, Riga also has the largest collection of Art Nouveau buildings in the world.

There are some 750 stand-out structures featuring mythical beasts, ghostly goblins or sensual goddesses.  If Riga was only heralded as the Art Nouveau Capital of the World that would be reason enough to visit this amazing city.

An illustrated feature on Riga can be written on assignment from 1000 to 2000 words, depending upon editorial requirements. 

A separate feature, a sidebar or a tri-country feature can also be written about the unique cultural attractions of Tallinn and Vilnius and the adjoining Baltic nations of Estonia and Lithuania. 

Guantanamera gives way to Black Magic Woman, then Lay Lady Lay… then the acrobats.  The buskers are hard at it again outside McDonalds on Kalku iela, Kalku Street, below my window.   

Another long summer evening is underway in Riga, the metropolis of the Baltic, a city more than 800 years old.  Across the bridge, Milda, Latvia's own statue of liberty, has triumphed over her arch-enemy, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who has been relegated to the scrapyards.

In the heart of Old Riga, the open-air cafes of Philharmonic Square, do a roaring trade, islands in the swirling human currents of the evening promenade.

Around the Central Market you enter a subtly different world, where Russian is the predominant language and the fashions are stuck somewhere in the Seventies.  Fully half of Latvia's population is ethnic Russian, their presence a potent reminder of the recent past.

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The hardest part of deciding to visit these countries is determining where to start. That is, unless your childhood was influenced by family stories of war and peace, the collective memory of the post-War emigre communities.

Yet the only obvious shared characteristics of the Baltic nations are compactness and a tortuous shared history as playthings of the great powers, most recently Russia. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians - from north to south - each speak their own languages, tenuously related to any other. There are no dramatic landscapes here, but endless forests and winding rivers, interlocking lakes and the wave-swept sands of the Baltic coast offer plenty of fresh air.

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