Palanga: the fossil resin of the Baltic

Lithuania's main beach resort, Palanga houses one of the world's richest amber museums, in a former nobleman's palace overlooking the sea.

The center and waterfront, celebrated for fossil amber from the Baltic, are comfortably explored on foot.

The Amber Museum, housed in a neoclassical nineteenth-century mansion surrounded by a botanical park, displays one of the world's largest collections of Baltic amber, including prehistoric insect inclusions.

Just nearby, the Pier of Palanga, extending for hundreds of meters into the Baltic Sea, remains the city's most celebrated point for watching the sunset over the water.

Continuing, you walk along Basanavičiaus Street, the city's main pedestrian avenue, animated by souvenir stalls in amber and ice cream shops.

As evening falls, the white sand beach of Palanga, among the Baltic's longest, offers a swim before dinner in the summer months.

Baltic amber, fossil resin millions of years old, is still collected today on Palanga's beaches after the strongest storms, which wash fragments ashore from the sea floor.

The botanical garden surrounding the Amber Museum was designed in the late nineteenth century by a French landscape architect at the wish of the noble family that owned the palace, now public heritage.