Jēkabpils lies on the Daugava, Latvia's great river, in the region called Sēlija, and its older German name, Jacobstadt, tells you who founded it. Duke Jacob Kettler of Courland, who ruled this land in the seventeenth century, planted a town here in 1670 and gave it his name, in the same decade he was trying to found colonies in Tobago and Gambia. The duchy was a small, wealthy state that punched above its weight. Across the river sits Krustpils, an older settlement with a castle, and the two towns grew together over the centuries and were merged in 1962.
The Daugava is the key to the place. It is wide, slow and brown here, with sandbanks and reeds, and for centuries it carried timber and grain down to Riga. A long bridge crosses it, and from the middle you see church spires on both banks. The town's most unexpected claim is scientific. In the nineteenth century, the astronomer Friedrich Struve measured a chain of triangles from Norway to the Black Sea to find the shape of the earth, and Jēkabpils was one of the points on this Struve Geodetic Arc, which is a World Heritage site.
The roads around are flat and open, crossing farmland, birch woods and old estates. The A6 highway links Riga and Daugavpils, and carries a lot of heavy traffic, so for pleasure it is better to take the smaller roads along the river and toward the Sēlija hills. Surfaces vary, and frost damage is common in spring. Winter is long and snowy, and the best time to ride is from May to September, when the evenings are very long.
Jēkabpils is a town of twenty-seven thousand and has fuel stations, supermarkets and cafes. Latvian food is simple and filling, with rye bread, smoked fish, grey peas with bacon, and in summer cold beetroot soup. Walk the river embankment in the evening, when the light turns gold and the swallows skim the water.