I finally tried the Latvian sauna — and this is what happened

The thing I’d been avoiding

I had been to Riga twice before without trying the sauna. This was not an accident. I’d read about the ritual — the extreme heat, the birch branches, the cold plunge, the nakedness — and decided each time that I’d do it “next trip.” On my third visit, in September 2021, a Latvian colleague who was showing us around made it non-negotiable.

“You haven’t been to Latvia,” he said, “until you’ve been to the pirts.”

He was right, though I didn’t know it yet.

What the Latvian pirts actually is

The Finnish sauna and the Latvian pirts share the basic principle — extreme heat in an enclosed wooden room — but culturally and practically they diverge considerably. The Finnish sauna tends toward silence and individual meditation. The Latvian pirts is social, ritualistic, and somewhat theatrical. It has been practiced for at least a thousand years and carries a significance that goes well beyond sweating.

The central experience is the pirts meistars — the sauna master — who controls the ritual. This involves heating the room to temperatures between 80°C and 100°C, then performing slapping with slotiņas (bunches of birch branches soaked in hot water and herbs). The branches are not used to beat you — the motion is more like a rhythmic fanning and patting that opens the pores, stimulates circulation, and smells extraordinary: birch leaves, oak, juniper, mint, depending on the bundle.

Between rounds of heat, you go outside. In September, the air was sharp enough to constitute a cold shock without needing a frozen lake. In winter, there may genuinely be a frozen lake.

How the booking worked

We booked through GetYourGuide rather than trying to find an independent pirts, which was the right call for a first experience. The traditional Latvian pirts sauna ritual experience runs for four hours, includes hotel pickup, and is led by a proper sauna master who speaks English and explains what’s happening and why at each stage.

The other option I’ve seen recommended — particularly for a more urban experience — is the floating sauna on the Daugava River, which is exactly what it sounds like: a sauna on a pontoon, with the river for cooling off. We didn’t try this one, but a colleague who did described it as absurdly enjoyable.

The full guide to Latvian sauna experiences near Riga covers the different formats in detail — traditional rural pirts, floating river saunas, urban spa options.

What actually happened

There were eight of us, a mixed group of locals and visitors. We changed into large cotton wrap-towels and were brought into the anteroom where tea made from dried herbs — something that tasted faintly of the forest — was already waiting.

The first round in the heat was relatively mild, perhaps 75°C. Enough to make you aware that you were in a sauna. The sauna master explained the session and we lay on tiered wooden benches. He added water with a long-handled ladle to the stones, producing a surge of wet heat — löyly in Finnish, tvaiks in Latvian — and the room’s temperature seemed to double instantly.

After ten minutes we went outside. The September air felt cold despite being probably 14°C.

The second round was hotter. This was when the birch branches appeared. The master asked each person in turn if they wanted the treatment, and everyone agreed, which was apparently not always the case. The slotiņas smelled like something from a childhood memory I don’t actually have — fresh birch, rain, something green and clean. The sensation was not painful. It was not exactly comfortable either. It was its own category of sensation.

After the third round, back in the anteroom, there was cold beer (Latvian lager, pale and very cold), rye bread with cheese, and a general state of post-sauna calm that I can only describe as being very deeply present. No phone anxiety. No restlessness. Just sitting in a warm wooden room eating good rye bread while my muscles forgot to hold any tension.

The cultural weight of it

My Latvian colleague explained that for much of Latvian history, the pirts was where children were born, where bodies were prepared for burial, where illness was treated. For centuries, before most households had proper bathing facilities, it was also simply where people cleaned themselves. The sauna master role carries real expertise — it takes years to learn the timing, the herbs, the reading of a group’s condition.

This is why the experience feels different from a hotel spa sauna. You are participating in something with genuine roots, not a designed-for-tourist approximation of something. The modern versions — especially the floating sauna on the Daugava — are contemporary inventions, but they pull from the same cultural thread.

Riga has several wellness options for those who want something closer to the city centre or more spa-like in format. But if you’re going to do one specifically Latvian thing during a visit to Riga, I’d vote for the pirts over any of them.

Practical notes for first-timers

Wear nothing. The appropriate attire in a traditional Latvian pirts is none. A wrapped towel for transit between the sauna and the cooling area is normal. If this is a hard barrier, the urban and floating options are more flexible on this point.

Don’t eat for two hours before. Heat on a full stomach is unpleasant.

Drink water steadily. You will sweat a remarkable amount. The beer afterwards is traditional, but hydration comes first.

Don’t rush it. Four hours sounds long. It isn’t. The rhythm of heat, cool, rest, heat creates a pace that feels genuinely restful rather than activity-packed. Plan nothing for the evening after.

September is excellent. The cooling air has a quality to it that July doesn’t — sharper, more effective, with a hint of autumn already present. The ritual has a slightly more elemental feeling in the shoulder season than in peak summer.

The ritual in wider Latvian culture

The pirts occupies a place in Latvian cultural identity that’s hard to parallel in Western European cultures. It’s not simply hygiene or relaxation — though it covers both — but something closer to a communal and spiritual practice that has survived urbanisation, Soviet occupation (saunas were permitted, sometimes officially; their cultural weight was suppressed), and the subsequent generation of European-lifestyle convergence.

Contemporary Latvians who live in Riga apartments may not have access to a personal pirts, but the experience of going to a proper one — particularly at family dachas in the countryside — remains deeply embedded. The ritual of Saturday sauna, followed by swimming in a lake or river, followed by a meal of smoked fish and dark bread and cold beer, is something many Latvians identify as a core of what being Latvian feels like.

This context is why the tourist versions, despite being designed for visitors, don’t feel entirely artificial. The ritual has enough weight that even a commercially organised version carries some genuine charge. The best operators — and the one we used was among them — take the cultural dimension seriously rather than treating it as an atmosphere decoration.

Who the sauna suits

The traditional pirts is intense. The heat is real, the birch treatment is real, the cold plunge is real. It’s not a spa experience in the pampered sense. That said: you don’t need to be physically exceptional. The pirts meistars manages the session for different participants, the rounds of heat are calibrated to the group, and there’s no pressure to stay in for longer than is comfortable. We had people in our group ranging from their mid-20s to late 60s, and everyone managed the experience well.

If you have specific heat sensitivities or cardiovascular conditions, check with your doctor before a traditional pirts. For healthy adults, the experience is challenging in a good way.

The floating sauna on the Daugava is a gentler entry point — the format is more flexible, the social element is the same, and the cold plunge into the river adds its own specific quality.

Where this leaves us in 2026

Updated May 2026 — the sauna options around Riga have expanded since 2021. There are now more floating sauna operators on the Daugava, and the guide to floating saunas on the river covers the current options. The traditional pirts experience remains largely unchanged — the ritual is the ritual — though prices have risen slightly, now around €95-110 per person. My colleague’s assessment holds: you haven’t been to Latvia until you’ve been to the pirts. It belongs alongside the art nouveau and the Central Market as a defining Riga experience.