1 Lats Kuldiga

Issued as part of Latvia's long-running series celebrating the country's historic towns, the 2002 Kuldiga lats honors one of the best-preserved medieval towns in the Baltic region — a place whose old-town core was largely untouched by the Soviet-era construction that reshaped most Latvian cities. Kuldiga is also home to the Venta Rapid, the widest waterfall in Europe by span, a detail the town has traded on for centuries.

The series itself was a deliberate cultural project tied to Latvia's post-independence identity, running through the late 1990s and into the 2000s before the lats was retired upon eurozone entry in 2014.