--- title: Liepāja Opens Its Year as European Capital of Culture With More Than 500 Events on Latvia's Baltic Coast description: Liepāja is European Capital of Culture 2027. The key dates, from the January opening to Sun & Sea, Andris Nelsons and Europa Cantat, and how to get there. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-09T10:01:00.757Z updated: 2026-11-09T10:22:35.123Z canonical: https://richtravelmagazine.com/article/liepaja-european-capital-of-culture-2027 image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/liepaja-boardwalk-1.webp categories: Destinations content_type: Feature region: Europe, Eastern Europe publication: Rich Travel Magazine schema_type: Article --- Liepāja sits on Latvia's Baltic coast, close to the border with Lithuania, and Latvians call it the city where the wind is born. About 70,000 people live there, which makes it the third-largest city in the country. In 2027 it shares the title of European Capital of Culture with [Évora in Portugal](https://richtravelmagazine.com/article/evora-european-capital-of-culture-2027), and it becomes only the second Latvian city to hold it, after Riga in 2014. The programme is called (un)rest. It brings more than 500 local and international events to Liepāja and to the neighbouring regions of South Kurzeme and Kuldīga, and it runs across five themes: European Dream, Port Paradox, Deliberate Modesty, New Eyes! and Creative Foresight. These are the dates to put in your diary. ## The Opening Weekend From 22nd to 24th January The year opens in the countryside on Friday 22nd January, with events across South Kurzeme and Kuldīga. Saturday 23rd January is the main day in Liepāja. The film director Matīss Kaža is staging an open-air performance called City Symphony in the streets, and the evening closes with the official opening concert at the Great Amber concert hall, where the Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds premieres a new work, Wind Symphony, written for the occasion. Tickets for the concert went on sale on 13th October 2026. More events follow in the city on Sunday 24th January. ## Sun & Sea at the Great Amber Concert Hall From 8th to 11th April 2027, the Lithuanian opera Sun & Sea comes to Latvia for the first time. The work won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and it was created by the director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, the writer Vaiva Grainytė and the composer Lina Lapelytė. For the Liepāja run, the main hall of the Great Amber turns into an artificial beach made from 30 tonnes of sand, where singers lie on towels and sing about sunburn, holidays and a warming planet. The opera runs several times a day across the four days, and tickets start at €55. Grainytė describes the visit as a homecoming: 'Liepāja's proximity to the Baltic sea brings the piece back to its native shore.' ## Chiharu Shiota and the Summer Exhibitions The Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, known for vast rooms filled with webs of red and black thread, holds her first solo exhibition in the Baltic states from 3rd March to 28th November 2027. It fills a historic bank building at Teātra iela 3. For one new work, the Liepāja 2027 Foundation is collecting 10,000 letters, and submissions close on 30th November 2026. From 29th May to 25th September, the dry dock of the Tosmare shipyard becomes an exhibition space, where the painter Andris Eglītis and other artists show large-scale works made in response to the old industrial site. ## Andris Nelsons, Europa Cantat and the Concert Calendar On 26th May, the Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons brings the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to Liepāja. On 10th July, the city hosts Eurovision Young Musicians. From 9th to 15th August, around 3,000 singers arrive for Europa Cantat, one of the oldest and largest choral festivals in Europe, held for the 22nd time. The Great Amber also runs a series called Stars in Amber, bringing in international musicians who have never performed in the city, and the Liepāja Symphony Orchestra stages its own festival, Opera by the Sea. ## What to See in Liepāja Between Events The Great Amber concert hall is the city's best-known landmark, a glass building shaped like a piece of the fossil resin that washes up on this coast. Away from the stage, the city has an 8 kilometre Blue Flag beach south of the centre, backed by a seaside park, and after a storm you can still find small pieces of amber on the sand. In the north of the city, Karosta was a closed military district in Soviet times. Its former military prison closed in 1997 and now offers guided tours, and you can even sleep in a cell. The gold domes of St Nicholas Maritime Cathedral stand nearby. In the old town, Madame Hoyer's Guest House is the oldest wooden building in Liepāja, and its owner hosted Peter the Great there in 1697. If you have a spare day, take the bus inland to Kuldīga, a UNESCO-listed town of red clay roofs and cobbled streets, where the Venta Rapid is the widest waterfall in Europe. ## Getting to Liepāja The simplest route is to fly to Riga and take one of the regular buses west across Latvia. Trains run between the two cities, but they are infrequent. Palanga airport, across the border in Lithuania, is another option, and ferries cross to Liepāja from Travemünde in Germany. airBaltic flies to Liepāja's own small airport, but the flights are mostly seasonal and sell out early. Plan at least three days in the city, and four or five if you want to catch several events. If you go in winter for the opening weekend, hotel prices fall by almost half compared with summer, and snow can last into March.