Salacgrīva Museum

In 1998, marking the 70th anniversary of Salacgrīva, the city decided to establish a museum. Seventy years of city history was a significant milestone, enough to recognize the richness of the local cultural heritage worth preserving, researching, and sharing with the public.

Today, the museum is located at 2 Sila Street, in a building constructed in 1989 on the foundations of the city’s former community house. It shares the space with the city library. Together, we form a small yet vibrant cultural center.

The museum is family-friendly and offers a variety of engaging activities for children. Visitors can build a traditional lamprey trap from wooden blocks, complete puzzles, weave colorful stripes into a long rag rug, take retro-style photos using the museum’s props, and test their knowledge in witty quizzes.

A new permanent exhibition titled LIV HERITAGE has recently opened. It chronologically covers the period from prehistory to the Soviet occupation, highlighting tangible and intangible signs of Liv heritage in Salacgrīva and its surroundings, once part of one of the four Liv-inhabited regions of Vidzeme, known as Metsepole. The exhibition paints a picture of the environment in which the Livs lived across centuries and how life evolved into the mid-20th century. Visitors can watch and listen to the Vidzeme Liv dialect from Svētciems, spoken by philologist, local historian, and poet Anita Emse, who shares stories from her native Uņģciems and reads her poetry in the dialect, still occasionally heard in the surrounding area today.

The museum also features a rotating exhibition space that regularly showcases art by local artists or highlights cultural events connected to the region.

The virtual exhibition “Salacgrīva Museum Treasures” offers an interactive and photographic journey through the region’s past and present.