More than 200 horses registered in Riga, kept at 20 addresses
Data from Latvia's Rural Service show that more than 200 horses are registered in the capital, Riga. They live at 20 addresses, and the story centres on Atgāzene, Riga's smallest neighbourhood.
More than 200 horses are registered in Riga, the capital of Latvia, a city with several hundred thousand residents and streets crowded with cars. The animals are kept at 20 different addresses. Latvian Radio found this out from the Latvian Rural Service.
What prompted the interest
Journalists began looking into horses in the city after an incident this week. A horse strayed just a few kilometres from Old Riga, the historic city centre. The animal turned up in Atgāzene, the smallest neighbourhood in Riga.
Horses in Atgāzene
In Atgāzene, horses turn out not to be a random exception. They are an old element of the neighbourhood's identity, so seeing horses in an urban setting is nothing new there.
In a report prepared by Latvian Radio, journalists travelled around Atgāzene to find both the horses and their owners. The report is published by LSM under a headline about the search for horses and their owners in Atgāzene.
The source gives no further details on how many horses are in Atgāzene itself, who owns them, or how they are kept. What is clear is that the official register confirms horses are present in Riga and that they are concentrated at a fairly small number of addresses.
