Tour of Dauderi Garden and Park “41 Steps Above Dauderi Dune” (with a climb to the castle ruins of Dauderi Park)

The tour begins in the magnificent Dauderi Garden and continues in the park adjacent to the house, which has recently been landscaped and renovated. The water tower-artificial castle ruins have also been renovated, and climbing them allows you to appreciate the length of 41 fathoms, as well as learn about the visual evidence of the castle ruins’ history. Looking at the city from a bird’s eye view, the tour offers the opportunity to learn a lot of new things about one of the most beautiful parks in the Sarkandaugava neighborhood.

The Dauderi Park tower was visually designed to resemble ancient castle ruins – made of broken pieces of steel stone, with irregular seams, neo-Romanesque windows and doors. In addition to its economic functions, the water tower also had a well-appointed room heated by a fireplace, which offered a magnificent view of the surrounding area. In the second half of the 1930s, when Dauderi served as Kārlis Ulmanis’ summer residence and the water tower no longer fulfilled its original function, the tower’s halls were furnished with an interior that combined neo-Romanesque and “Latvian style” elements. From the 1960s, the tower was used by mountaineers for training. In 1998, the artificial castle ruins, together with the park, became a protected cultural monument of local significance in Riga, and today they are recognized as one of the most important buildings of this type in Latvia.

Which ancient Greek deity greets every visitor to the Dauderi Park castle ruins? What did Kārlis Ulmanis’s study with a fireplace look like? What items were excavated during the restoration of the Dauderi castle ruins?