The dwarf pines
Century-old trees a single metre tall.
Gatis Pāvils — Public domain · Scotch Mist — CC BY-SA 4.0 · BirdsEyeLV — CC BY-SA 3.0 · home lv — CC BY-SA 4.0
The moss bog is acid, nutrient-poor and waterlogged, so trees grow extremely slowly — a metre-high pine may be a century old, and that is what gives the place its strange appearance.
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A boardwalk over a bog of dwarf trees and black pools: the Great Ķemeri Bog trail is Latvia's most famous walk — a timber loop of three kilometres (or a short one-kilometre route) raised over a ten-thousand-year-old moss bog, among dwarf pines no taller than a metre despite being a century old, with black pools mirroring the sky. Its fame came from the sunrise: before dawn mist lifts off the pools so the trees appear to float, and the sky reddens in the water — the scene has become Latvia's most photographed landscape, and people come specially before dawn (the trail is open around the clock). A watchtower halfway round gives the whole view. The park is wider than the trail: forests, lakes and the sulphur springs that gave rise to the abandoned Ķemeri spa resort, whose vast white hotel of 1936 still stands, a photographed ruin. An hour west of Riga, with the Jūrmala train stopping at Ķemeri station, then a walk or a bike ride.
Century-old trees a single metre tall.
A white 1936 palace, a photographed ruin.
Ķemeri, Jūrmala