The Nature Park “Engure Lake” was established in 1998 and includes not only Engure Lake and the lands around it, but also the coast of the Gulf of Riga from Mērsrags to Engure, as well as the forests between the coast and the lake.

For more than 40 years the park has been the field base of the Laboratory of Ornithology of the Institute of Biology on the shore of Engure Lake. The animal enclosures and the Orchid Trail are open to travellers and interested visitors.

Enclosures for wild livestock have been set up in the Lake Engure Nature Park on a total area of more than 100 ha. Around 70 cattle – Latvian Blue, Highlander, Charole, Hereford and Alpengrey cows, as well as around 20 Polski Konik horses – graze in a 25 ha paddock at the Ornithological Research Centre and in another 36 ha paddock at Krievrag near Kūļciems.

To make the birds and the beautiful landscape of Lake Engure more visible to visitors of the nature park, a bird observation tower has been built by the lake (or rather, on pontoons in the lake). A trail leads to the tower through the lakeside pastures of horses and cows, which means you have to walk past the animals, so be careful.

The floodplain meadows, grass marshes and wet forests of Lake Engure Nature Park boast a great diversity of orchid species – 22 of the 32 orchid species found in Latvia grow in the vicinity of Lake Engure. In the nature park you can see rich stands of the fly orchid – a very rare orchid found only in Kurzeme. To give visitors to the nature park the opportunity to see these interesting plant species, an Orchid Trail has been created.

The total length of the trail is 3.5 km, starting near the Engure Ornithological Research Centre, meandering through calciphilous marshes and forest towards the bird observation tower, and continuing along the restored lakeside meadow, which is home to cows and horses. The information sign at the beginning of the trail depicts not only the orchids found in the area.

Photos from the Tukums TIC archive.