Things to do in Wales
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Celtic Diving
Runs half-day scuba-diving taster sessions in its own practice pool (£65), as well as PADI-certificated diving courses. Dive sites include several wrecks.
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Llandudno Museum
Llandudno Museum presents local history through an assortment of artefacts and explores themes such as the development of the town as a holiday resort.
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Bar Creation & Club Eden
One of the biggest gay venues in Wales, this bar and club combo stages a packed programme of club nights, drag acts, film screenings and cabaret shows.
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Home Front Experience
Home Front Experience is a small museum that looks at life at home during WWII, and offers visitors the chance to try out an air-raid shelter.
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Andrew Morton Books
Andrew Morton Books offers a staggering selection of fiction, nonfiction and local interest books. There's another branch at 10-11 Lion Yard.
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D Fecci & Sons
For the best fish and chips in town, head to D Fecci & Sons , in business since 1935.
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Tenby Cycles
You can rent bikes from Tenby Cycles.
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St David's
Immense is the best way to describe this shiny new shopping centre. All of the high-street chains you could name have a home here, along with a smorgasbord of eateries, a cinema multiplex and a large branch of the John Lewis department store, which dominates its south end.
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Doctor Who Up Close
The huge success of the reinvented classic TV series Doctor Who, produced by BBC Wales, has brought Cardiff to the attention of sci-fi fans worldwide. City locations have featured in many episodes and the spin-off series Torchwood is set in Cardiff Bay (the hidden lift to their headquarters emerges beneath the water sculpture in Roald Dahl Plass). Capitalising on Timelord tourism, this permanent exhibition has opened in the Red Dragon Centre, with props and costumes from both shows displayed alongside video clips from the episodes they feature in. It's great fun – especially when you come face to face with full-size Daleks in full 'ex-ter-min-ate' mode. Fans can pick up a…
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Conwy Castle & Town Wall
Probably the most stunning of all Edward I's Welsh fortresses, built between 1277 and 1307, Conwy Castle rises from a rocky outcrop with commanding views across the estuary and Snowdonia National Park. Exploring the castle's nooks and crannies makes for a superb, living-history visit but, best of all, head to the battlements for panoramic views and an overview of Conwy's majestic complexity.
The 1200m-long Conwy town wall was built simultaneously with the castle, guarding Conwy's residents at night. You can walk part-way round the wall; the best views are to be had from Upper Gate.
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Castle Restaurant & Armoury Bar
If this place were transported to London it would have queues out the door, so one has to admire the gumption of opening such a wonderful Caribbean restaurant in Wales, let alone in sleepy Harlech. Upstairs is the coolest cocktail bar in North Wales – red curtains, bauble chandeliers and a smooth soundtrack of Trojan reggae. Downstairs, the locals are switching on to the spicy delights of goat curry, jerk chicken and blackened salmon.
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Bizzie Lizzie's Bistro
A warmly lit basement with country-kitchen pine furniture and green-and-white check tablecloths, decorated with bric-a-brac and old street signs, Bizzie's has a half-vegetarian, half-carnivore menu - whichever you are, go for the delicious nut roast with chilli and tomato sauce.
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St David's Cathedral
Hidden in a hollow and behind high walls, St David's Cathedral is intentionally unassuming. The valley site was chosen in the vain hope that the church would be overlooked by Viking raiders, but it was ransacked at least seven times. Yet once you pass through the gatehouse that separates it from the town and its stone walls come into view, it's as imposing as any of its contemporaries.
Built on the site of a 6th-century chapel, the building dates mainly from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Extensive works were carried out in the 19th century by Sir George Gilbert Scott (architect of the Albert Memorial and St Pancras in London) to stabilise the building. The distinctive …
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Caernarfon Castle
Majestic Caernarfon Castle was built between 1283 and 1330 as a military stronghold, a seat of government and a royal palace. Inspired by the dream of Macsen Wledig recounted in the Mabinogion, Caernarfon echoes the 5th-century walls of Constantinople, with colour-banded masonry and polygonal towers, instead of the traditional round towers and turrets.
Despite its fairytale aspect it is thoroughly fortified. It repelled Owain Glyndŵr's army in 1404 with a garrison of only 28 men, and resisted three sieges during the Civil War before surrendering to Cromwell's army in 1646.
A year after the construction of the building was begun, Edward I's second son was born here,…
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Tenby & Caldey Island
Charming Tenby is the epicentre of Pembrokeshire coast holiday culture. The image of its sheltered harbour and lifeboat slipway, overlooked by pastel Georgian townhouses, is a Pembrokeshire badge. Tenby's top trip is the 20-minute boat ride to Caldey Island, the home of a community of Cistercian monks, as well as grey seals and Wales' largest cormorant colony.
Located on a rocky promontory surrounded at low tide by golden sands, Tenby's old town features attractive architecture, steep streets and curious nooks, plus a 500m section of town wall. The place is popular with well-heeled weekend tourists and sore-heeled coast path walkers.
The castle on the promontory above the…
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Cathedral Church of St Deiniol
Also called the Cathedral Church of St Deiniol, the cathedral - surprisingly squat, partly due to lack of cash for a central spire - occupies one of the oldest ecclesiastical sites in Britain. Dedicated to St Deiniol, who founded a cell here in AD 525 and who was consecrated as bishop in AD 546, the cathedral's earliest traces are of a 12th-century stone building, while some of what you see today is based on reconstruction work in the late 13th century.
Responsibility for damage can be blamed on King John, whose men also burned the city, seized the bishop and ransomed him for 200 falcons. Further ravages took place at the turn of the 15th century, during the Glyndŵr…
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Cardiff Bay Waterfront
Lined with important national institutions, Cardiff Bay is where the modern Welsh nation is put on display in an architect's playground of interesting buildings, large open spaces and public art. It wasn't always this way. By 1913 more than 13 million tonnes of coal was being shipped from Cardiff's docks. Following the post-WWI slump the docklands deteriorated into a wasteland of empty basins, cut off from the city by the railway embankment. The bay outside the docks – which has one of the highest tidal ranges in the world (more than 12m between high and low water) – was ringed for up to 14 hours a day by smelly, sewage-contaminated mudflats.
Since 1987 the area has…
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Senedd (National Assembly Building)
Designed by Lord Richard Rogers (the architect behind London's Lloyd's Building and Paris' Pompidou Centre), the Senedd is a striking structure of concrete, slate, glass and steel with an undulating canopy roof lined with red cedar. It's won awards for an environmentally friendly design, which includes a huge rotating cowl on the roof for power-free ventilation and a gutter system that collects rainwater for flushing the toilets. The lobby and surrounding area are littered with public artworks.
The Welsh National Assembly usually meets in a plenary session from 1.30pm on Tuesday and Wednesday, and seats in the public gallery may be pre-booked, although you can always take…
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Maritime Quarter
WWII bombing flattened much of central Swansea, which was rebuilt as a rather soulless retail development in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. What little remains of Georgian and Victorian Swansea stretches from Wind St and York St to Somerset Pl and Cambrian Way in the Maritime Quarter ; this is the most attractive part of the city centre.
The area around the former docks to the southeast of the city centre was originally redeveloped as a residential area in the 1980s - low-rise red- and yellow-brick apartment blocks with blue-painted steel balconies, which are beginning to look a little tired now. The South Dock and the Tawe Basin (enclosed by a smaller version of Cardiff Bay's…
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St Mary's Priory Church & Tithe Barn
Relatively modest-looking, St Mary's contains a remarkable treasury of aristocratic tombs within. It was founded at the same time as the castle (1087) as part of a Benedictine priory, but the present building dates mainly from the 14th century, with 15th- and 19th-century additions and alterations. In the northern transept is one of the most important medieval carvings in Europe – a monumental 15th-century wooden representation of the biblical figure of Jesse.
The priory's 13th century tithe barn has recently been restored and converted into an excellent heritage centre and a food hall focusing on locally sourced Welsh products.
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Skomer, Skokholm & Grassholm Islands
Lying off Wales' best beaches in St Brides Bay, the islands are a marine nature reserve populated by immense sea-bird colonies, grey seals and dolphins. Skomer is home to over 500,000 breeding sea birds and about 150 grey seal pups are born here annually. Skokholm is the habitat for 35,000 Manx shearwaters and puffins and Grassholm has 33,000 gannet pairs.
Skomer is the largest and easiest island to reach. Its breeding bird colonies include puffins, guillemots, razorbills, fulmars, cormorants, shags, and the burrow-breeding Manx shearwater. Together Skomer and Skokholm have the largest colony in the world: 160,000 strong.
To visit Skomer, the Dale Princess cruiser offers…
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Valle Crucis Abbey
Also within walking distance of Llangollen, the dignified ruins of the abbey – another of the region's ancient treasures – evoke the lives of Wales' Cistercian monks through interpretation material.
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Marine Terrace
A stroll along Marine Terrace, the walkway overlooking North Beach, is the most genteel pursuit on offer and one that harks back to the town's erstwhile halcyon days as a Victorian resort. When you reach the bottom of the 1.5-mile prom, it's customary to kick the white bar, although the locals can't seem to explain the rationale behind this ritual.
North Beach is lined by faintly shabby Georgian hotels, albeit with a couple of notable exceptions. The top-heavy Royal Pier lumbers out to sea under the weight of its cheerfully tacky amusements arcade. North Beach is also the main swimming beach as South Beach has few facilities, although both beaches have lifeguards and an…
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St David's Cathedral
This is Wales' holiest place, receiving a stream of pilgrims year round. The main granite building was constructed in the 12th century on a site where a church had existed for 600 years. Welsh patron saint Dewi Sant established the first monastic community here in the 6th century. His shrine is in the northern choir aisle; his relics are behind the altar.
The atmosphere inside the cathedral is one of great antiquity.
The floor slopes sharply and the pillars keel drunkenly following a 1248 earthquake. The Norman nave's superb Irish oak ceiling was carved in the 16th century. The equally richly carved choir in the centre of the cross is illuminated from the tower above.
Try…
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Conwy Castle
Rising from a rocky outcrop with commanding views across the estuary and Snowdonia National Park, Conwy Castle may look like a fairytale construction. But it's very much solid, with eight fierce, slightly tapered towers of coarse dark stone and four additional turrets poking from the interior. The castle took just five years (1283-87) to build, with 1500 workers helping at the height of construction, and remains today one of the greatest examples of medieval military architecture in the UK.
After the Civil War in the 17th century, it fell into disrepair and the Council of State ordered it to be partially pulled down. Inside it's more tumbledown than its Unesco partner at…
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