Riga's Parks Want You to Be Quiet. Zagreb's Parks Want You to Show Up.

🇱🇻🇭🇷 Latvia vs Croatia

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Latvia is, by land area, roughly half forest, and that fact seeps into every aspect of how Latvians relate to green space — Riga's parks, particularly along the Pilsētas canal and out into Kaiser Forest (Ķeizarmežs), function less as social venues and more as an extension of a broader, almost spiritual national relationship with nature, one built around quiet, solitary walking, mushroom foraging, and a general belief that a forest doesn't need to be improved with a food truck. Croatia takes almost the opposite approach: Zagreb's parks, above all the grand nineteenth-century "Green Horseshoe" of Zrinjevac and its neighbours, are built explicitly for public life — benches for gossiping, open lawns for gathering, and an entire local culture that treats the park as a genuine extension of the living room, loud, social, and constantly in use.

I've walked through a Riga park on a Sunday morning and encountered maybe four other people, each one deliberately, almost pointedly, not making eye contact. I've also sat in Zagreb's Zrinjevac on a Sunday morning and been unable to find an empty bench because half the neighbourhood had already claimed one for coffee, dogs, or an unscheduled argument about football. Neither city would describe this as remarkable. Both would find the other's version slightly bizarre.

Do's & Don'ts: Latvia

Do's & Don'ts: Croatia

Latvia: A National Relationship With the Forest, Not the Park Bench

Latvia's relationship with green space starts from a fact most visitors don't clock immediately: the country is genuinely, overwhelmingly forested — over half its land area — and that abundance shapes an entirely different cultural instinct than countries where green space is scarce and therefore must be maximised for social use. Riga's own parks, threaded along the historic Pilsētas canal that loops around the Old Town, are pleasant, well-kept, and quietly used, but the real cultural centre of gravity for nature sits further out, in genuine forest — Ķeizarmežs and Mežaparks in particular, sprawling wooded areas that function as the city's actual lungs and its residents' actual preferred escape.

What defines the culture more than any specific park is the deeply ingrained national habit of foraging. Come autumn, an extraordinary share of Latvians — across class, age, and urban/rural divide — head into the forest for mushrooms and berries, a practice with roots in Soviet-era necessity that has long since transformed into genuine cultural identity and quiet pride, complete with closely guarded family foraging spots passed down like heirlooms. It's not framed as a hobby so much as a birthright, and it shapes an entire relationship to green space built around solitude, observation, and a kind of reverent quiet that would feel almost monastic to a visitor from a louder park culture.

This quiet extends into everyday park etiquette in Riga itself: loud conversation, music, or large group gatherings in green spaces are genuinely uncommon and mildly frowned upon, not by any rule but by ambient social pressure. Latvians tend to use parks individually or in pairs — a solitary walk, a quiet run, a bench read — rather than as venues for the kind of large, loose, multi-generational socialising common further south. The forest is sacred, essentially, and the park is its quiet, well-mannered cousin in the city, not a stage for anything performative.

Croatia: The Park as Living Room

Zagreb's green space culture centres, historically and socially, on the "Green Horseshoe" (Zelena potkova) — a nineteenth-century sequence of connected parks and squares, Zrinjevac chief among them, designed deliberately as public promenading space when the city was modernising under Austro-Hungarian influence. That original design intention — parks as places to be seen, to socialise, to promenade — never really faded, and it shows in how thoroughly and constantly Zagreb's parks are used today. Zrinjevac on a weekend is less a green space than an open-air social hall: benches full of pensioners playing chess or trading gossip, families sprawled on the lawns, dogs everywhere, and a general noise level that would be unthinkable in a Riga park.

Maksimir, Zagreb's largest and oldest public park (one of the first public parks in this part of Europe, opened in 1794), extends the same logic on a bigger scale — a genuine zoo, lakes, forested walking trails, and enough space that it absorbs enormous weekend crowds without ever feeling truly quiet. What's distinctive about Croatian park culture more broadly is how unselfconsciously social it is: striking up conversation with a stranger on a shared bench isn't an intrusion, it's simply how a park is supposed to work, and dog owners in particular treat the park as a genuine community hub, trading updates on each other's lives as regularly as on each other's dogs.

This social intensity around parks connects to a broader Mediterranean-adjacent rhythm of life that values visible, public leisure — the passeggiata instinct, essentially, applied to green space rather than just the street. Coffee culture bleeds directly into park use: kiosks and cafés ring most major Zagreb parks, and a "walk in the park" is frequently indistinguishable from an extended, multi-stop social outing that might involve three different coffees and running into at least two people you know. Solitude is available if you want it, technically, but it's not really what the parks are built or used for — they exist, fundamentally, as a shared civic living room, and Zagrebians treat them exactly that way, loudly and often.

The Verdict

Latvia's relationship with green space is the more profound one, honestly — a country that has preserved genuine forest identity and passed down foraging knowledge across generations has something Zagreb's manicured, sociable parks simply can't replicate: a real, lived, spiritual connection to nature rather than a decorative one. But profound doesn't always mean more enjoyable to actually be inside, and there's a loneliness to Riga's parks that, after enough quiet Sundays, starts to feel less like reverence and more like a country that's forgotten parks can also just be fun.

I'm giving this one to Croatia, mostly because Zagreb has figured out something Riga hasn't fully embraced: a park's highest use isn't contemplation, it's community, loudly and messily assembled on a shared lawn. Latvia gave me quiet and mushrooms. Croatia gave me a stranger's opinion on my dog, three unplanned coffees, and a genuine sense of belonging to a neighbourhood within twenty minutes of sitting down. Nature is nice. Being known by your park bench regulars is nicer.

What Nobody Warned You About

Reddit r/latvia — paraphrased: a foreign resident said their biggest cultural miscalculation was bringing a portable speaker to a Riga park picnic, and the silent disapproval from every direction taught them faster than any rule ever could.

Internations Zagreb — paraphrased: an expat said they made more genuine local friends sitting on a Zrinjevac bench over a few weekends than in six months of organised networking events.

Quora — paraphrased response to "What are public parks like in Riga vs other Baltic capitals?": a local said the real Riga park experience isn't downtown at all — it's a weekend trip into Ķeizarmežs with a basket, and anyone who skips that is missing the actual point.

Conclusion

Latvia and Croatia both love their green spaces fiercely — they just disagree completely about what a green space is for. Riga treats its forests as something closer to a national soul, best approached quietly, alone, and with a mushroom basket. Zagreb treats its parks as a stage for daily life, best approached loudly, with company, and ideally a dog. Visit Latvia if you want to remember what silence sounds like. Visit Croatia if you want to remember what a neighbourhood feels like. Only one of them will result in you knowing three strangers' names by the time you leave the park, and it will not be the quiet one.