Jūrmala

In Jūrmala, the Soviet space program built a sanatorium for cosmonauts. Brezhnev and Khrushchev vacationed on its beaches. Russian oligarchs paid €4 million for beachfront villas. In 2022, Latvia closed the doors on all of it.

Jūrmala—"seaside" in Latvian—was a string of fishing villages until 1877, when the Riga-Tukums railway transformed it into a beach escape for the Russian Empire's Baltic elite. Each of the 15 villages along the 24-kilometer coastline gained its own station, and wooden villas proliferated among the pine forests whose therapeutic air—rich with phytoncides—drew visitors seeking cures. Just 25 kilometers from Riga, it became the capital's playground.

The 1940 Soviet occupation nationalized those villas and replaced many with brutalist sanatoriums—state-subsidized health resorts where workers received mandatory rest. By 1959, the villages were unified as a single city: no longer "Riga's seaside" but the entire Union's. At its Soviet peak, 260,000 visitors arrived annually, making Jūrmala the third-largest resort in the USSR after Yalta and Sochi. The Vaivari National Rehabilitation Centre began as the "Cosmonaut Sanatorium" for space program workers. Dzintari Concert Hall hosted all-Union music festivals. Most remarkably, two sanatoriums remained in foreign hands long after independence: the Kremlin's "Jantarnij bereg" (Amber Coast) and Lukashenko's "Belorusija" sat ten kilometers apart on EU soil. Jūrmala was the only city in Europe where two post-Soviet dictatorships owned beachfront property.

Independence in 1990 devastated the sanatorium economy—Eastern visitors couldn't afford visas, Latvians discovered cheap flights to Turkey. But from 2010, Latvia's golden visa program created a new customer base. Russian oligarchs bought beachfront properties: Mikhail Fridman's €5.6 million villa, Alisher Usmanov's family compound for €4 million. By 2015, golden visas had injected over €1.1 billion into Latvian real estate, much of it concentrated in Jūrmala.

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine ended this dependency abruptly. Latvia banned golden visas for Russians, closed borders to Russian tourists, and in 2025 prohibited Russian citizens from purchasing property entirely—parliament declaring such transactions "hybrid warfare instruments." Both Kremlin and Belarusian sanatoriums shuttered. Property prices in the Riga area dropped 8.4% in 2023. By that year, Jūrmala's GDP per capita had reached €11,500—still ninth among Latvia's ten state cities, less than a third of Riga's €34,400.

Jūrmala exhibits the biology of a hermit crab: the city occupies a Soviet shell it didn't build, and has always required external visitors to survive. Now it attempts what ecologists call a regime shift—from Russian to Western and Asian customers. Chinese investors comprised 37% of golden visa applications in early 2024. But 52,000 residents sit on infrastructure built for Soviet-scale visitor flows that may never return. The question is whether the city can find a new host species before its inherited shell crumbles entirely.