Latvia Natural Environment

Latvia is situated on the east coast of the Baltic Sea in northern Europe, and shares borders with Estonia to the north, Lithuania to the south, Russia to the east and Belarus to the southeast.  The size of the country is 64,589 sq km.  The coordinates are 57 degrees North and 25 degrees East.  As Latvia is only a few degrees below the Artic Circle, the summer days are long, and the winter days may have no more than 7 hours of daylight.

The landscape in Latvia was shaped largely by the ice age when glaciers ground the land and turned soil and rocks into low hills.  The highest elevation is about 300 m, with one quarter of the country covered by gentle hills and highlands in the central, east and western regions; the rest are undulating plains.  The most fertile plains lie south of Riga and is the main agricultural centre of the country.

More than 40% of the land is covered by forests; most of them grow valuable pine and Spruce but large tracts of forests are overgrown scrub trees.  There are over 3,000 small lakes throughout the country often forming a beautiful landscape.  Around 10% of the terrain is covered by peat bogs and marshes, and during the rainy season, many parts of the lowlands are water-logged.

Although there more than 12,000 rivers in the country, there are only a few major rivers.  One of them is the Daugava, which comes from Russia, flows through Belarus and runs a 370 km course through the center of Latvia from the south before emptying into the Gulf of Rîga.

The capital city is Riga, which has a population of about 720,000 inhabitants.