Kuldīga District Museum
Regional museum in the Bangert Villa above the Venta rapids, in UNESCO-listed old Kuldīga.
The museum occupies the Bangert Villa, a wooden and masonry house built around 1900 on the rampart of the thirteenth-century Livonian Order castle. The site had held the most important building in Kuldīga: after the Order collapsed the castle became a residence of the dukes of Courland, and Duke Jacob Kettler was born there in 1610. The villa's east balcony looks out over the Venta rapids and the old brick bridge, while the reconstructed Town Garden lies to the west. The museum itself was founded in 1935.
The first floor holds the visitor centre and temporary exhibitions; the second is arranged as an apartment showing how a well-off Kuldīga resident lived at the beginning of the twentieth century, including the playing-card collection of Jānis Mētra. A second site in the former Bank of Latvia building on Dzirnavu iela houses what the museum describes as the largest open-access collection display in Latvia, with more than 2,800 objects from central Courland. Kuldīga's old town was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023.
Highlights
- Balcony view over the Venta rapids and the old brick bridge
- Period apartment of a wealthy Kuldīga resident, about 1900
- Open-access collection display of over 2,800 objects nearby
- Built on the rampart of the Livonian Order castle site
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