Mazsalaca

Mazsalaca is a town in Valmiera Municipality, in the Vidzeme region of Latvia, with 1269 inhabitants in the source. It is also the extraterritorial centre of Mazsalaca Parish. Its name in Livonian is Piškisalāts, in Estonian Väike-Salatsi and in German Salisburg. The area holds the largest known Stone Age burial site in Northern Europe and was first settled around 5000 BC. The present town began to develop in 1864, when a bridge was built over the Salaca river, and it received town rights in 1928. During the Second World War it was under German occupation from 4 July 1941 until 25 September 1944. In October 2009 a meteorite crater was claimed to have been found near the town, but this later turned out to be a hoax in a marketing campaign by the telecommunications company Tele2.