Grobiņa

Grobina is a town in the Courland region of Latvia, eleven kilometers east of Liepaja, and serves as the administrative center of South Kurzeme municipality. Founded by the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century, it still shows ruins of Grobina Castle and received its town charter in 1695. During the Early Middle Ages the settlement, then known as Grobin, was the most important political center in the territory of Latvia and a hub of Scandinavian settlement on the Baltic comparable to Hedeby and Birka, with about 3,000 surviving burial mounds from the Vendel Age.