Salaspils Municipality
11,000-year-old settlements drowned by Riga Dam (402 MW, 1975). Site of Battle of Kircholm (1605). Nazi concentration camp where 3,000+ died. Two-thirds commute to Riga.
Salaspils contains Latvia's newest and second-largest hydroelectric dam (402 MW, 1966-1975)—and the reservoir that flooded its ancient history. Archaeological evidence shows human settlement here from 11,000-10,000 BCE, some of Latvia's earliest. The dam buried those sites along with later monuments.
The municipality's most famous battle came in 1605: Kircholm, where Polish-Lithuanian forces crushed a larger Swedish army in one of the biggest clashes of the Polish-Swedish War. More recent history is darker. In 1941, German authorities established the largest civilian concentration camp in the Baltic states 2 km northwest of town. Over 3,000 people died there—a figure far lower than Soviet-era claims of 100,000, but devastating nonetheless.
The Salaspils Memorial (opened 1967) is the best-surviving example of monumental Soviet propaganda in Latvia: massive concrete sculptures on the camp site. The Daugava Museum, housed in an 1898 manor, preserves what the dam didn't flood.
Today two-thirds of residents commute to Riga. By 2026, Salaspils will remain what it has been since the dam was built: a suburb whose identity was drowned to power the capital.