Lithuania’s secret UNESCO heritage-listed weapon

I heard about the Curonian Spit when comparing notes with fellow travellers at the Extraordinary Travel Festival in Armenia last year. A participant got their phone out and first showed me the map, then pictures of her trip. Honestly, the map was enough for me; I was sold.

I’ve arrived for just a few days. Most foreign tourists hail from the other Baltic States, with the big exception of Scandinavians, and some Germans.

It’s certainly got plenty to recommend it, including a diverse range of activities all located within a one-mile radius. Around 2pm, I haul myself up a mighty sand dune with a quick jog, before taking a dip in the bracing waters of the Baltic. (Even though it’s July, it’s cold enough to prompt a squawk as you go in). During the late afternoon, I walk and cycle through a heavily scented pine forest. By 10pm, I’ve eaten dinner, and am still enjoying a glass of wine overlooking the sunset on the lagoon.

The heart of the spit is its administrative centre, Nida. This pretty resort town is full of brightly painted houses; home to an orderly community of just over 3600 residents. Incredibly, it gets 400,000 visitors a year, and Nida has long been beloved of the literati, including German Nobel laureate and author Thomas Mann, whose summer house is now a museum.

Clean and green, Nida is busy during the long summer days, filled with people walking the lagoon waterfront, and getting around on bikes.

By night, it hums with activity in bars and restaurants. Local institution Tik Pas Jona overlooks the lagoon, and has an old smoking rack from which carp and mackerel hang. I place my order, select my chosen fish off the rack, and eat it on rye bread.

A little further along is Nidos Seklycia, also known as été, a high-end place where I eat oysters and sole amid a canopy of pines. Favoured bars include Faksas, a rustic place of wooden crate seats where live bands entertain the drinkers, and Kastonas, with a similar vibe right on the water.

In early August, the Jazz Marathon rolls into town; the 2023 crop included Dutch outfit the Alexander Beets Quintet, Estonian player Lembit Saarsalu, and local Lithuanian Leonid Vintskevich. Both from Spain, La Canarian Local Jazz Band and Las Karamba are also here, as is Very Cool People from Latvia.

During summer, there’s always something on, from rock cover bands to exhibitions by Lithuanian artists. The soft pink skies that don’t fade until 11pm are the perfect backdrop for a lively, feelgood mood, as people sit clustered around the marina, enjoying the sense of community.

Nida is also full of museums, on subjects like amber (considered a Baltic treasure), and the local fishing industry. An ethnographic cemetery – filled with wooden grave monuments set amid a peaceful patch of woodland – harks back to the spit’s pagan past.

The town has a wealth of English signage to benefit tourists, and English is surprisingly widely spoken – just not by the owner of my guesthouse, who spends her days trying to convey some instruction to me about the keys.

Nor do the parking attendants converse in English. I’m in constant strife with them for having my rental car in the wrong place at all times it seems. Top tip: check if your guesthouse has parking, for you will need it.

Everyone who comes here should make the pilgrimage to the last remaining great shifting dune on the spit, the Parnidis Dune, which reaches about 50 metres. It’s in constant flux, fortified by woven stick fences that keep the drift under control, and the authorities implore visitors to stick to the paths so as not to hasten its erosion.

The Parnidis Dune is also a good vista from which to see something interesting. From up here, looking south, you’re staring straight at Russia. It’s not easy to see where the border is, given it cuts through the middle of a massive dune. But it’s there. And that brings us to a quirk of the spit.

Go back to your map of Lithuania, and you’ll see that its southern border neighbours an odd pocket of Russia called Kaliningrad – a province cut off from the motherland by Lithuania and Poland.

And yet, Kaliningrad is very much part of Russia; this border is one of the places where the European Union and Russia meet. Always an uneasy frontier, it has become downright sinister since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There is a road along the spit which links Lithuania with Kaliningrad. But when I start to drive to the border just south of Nida, the road is blocked. A local ranger tells me this is nothing to do with geopolitics so much as an extreme effort at conservation whereby the area around the border, called the Grobšto gamtinis rezervatas, is off-limits for everyone and everything: be it cars, bikes, or even dog walkers.

From the road, you can walk to the beach on the Baltic side. To the south – past a roped section and an assortment of almost exclusively naked Lithuanian sunbathers (it is very much in your interests to learn which signs mean nudist beach and which ones clothed) – you can see Russia.

You can’t see the actual border but it runs right through the middle of the beach.

Lithuania is proudly independent. The first former Soviet republic to declare independence in 1990, only 5 per cent of its people identify as Russian, and it has watched events in Ukraine with alarm.

When you arrive at the airport in Lithuania, in my case in the city of Kaunas (from London’s Luton airport), there are signs everywhere, in Ukrainian colours, for a campaign called Call Russia, aimed at informing Russians about activities in Ukraine.

Many Lithuanians fear something similar could one day happen to them, which makes this incongruous border through a peaceful beach somewhat darker than it used to be.

Borders are frequently arbitrary, but this one seems particularly obtuse. The spit is a natural geographical oddity that’s now unbridgeable because of an invisible line.

I find myself thinking that the sky is equally blue, the pines equally scented and the water equally freezing on each side of the line. I can only speak to the Lithuanian side, from which I conclude that this is a place far more people should have heard of, and that I’m privileged to have seen.

The writer travelled at his own expense.