Jūrmala
Wooden Dachas on the Baltic
Portrait
A strip of pine and sand between the Lielupe and the Gulf of Riga carries some four hundred protected wooden houses built for summer people between the 1870s and the 1930s, jigsawed verandas and all. The Soviet decades turned it into a sanatorium coast for the whole union, which is why a Latvian resort town of forty thousand has concert halls sized for a much larger one.
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