Gulbene

Gulbene's medieval history centered on a stone castle built for the archbishop of Riga in 1340 on an earlier Latgalian hillfort. The castle district appears in fifteenth-century sources as Schwanenburg. During the Livonian War in 1577, Ivan IV's army destroyed the castle and devastated the small settlement. The ruin marked a sharp break in the history of this inland center.

Estate ownership subsequently connected Gulbene with successive Baltic regimes. In 1621 Gustavus Adolphus granted Schwanenburg to Field Marshal Gustav Horn. Livonia passed to Russia under the Treaty of Nystad in 1721. The parish school admitted its first pupils in 1733, and Catherine II granted the estate to Count Ernst Münnich in 1763. By 1802 Vecgulbene belonged to the Wolff family. A distillery built in 1811 added a specific manufacturing establishment to the estate landscape.