The piazza and campanile
A candy-coloured Italian square that a Welsh architect raised over fifty years, salvaged fragments worked in among his own designs, done in an hour.
Llywelyn2000 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Mike McBey — CC BY 2.0 · Peter Trimming — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Peter Trimming — CC BY-SA 2.0
On a grey Welsh estuary, a complete Italian village in pistachio, apricot and rose appears out of the trees: a campanile, a piazza, domes and colonnades, and every bit of it a beautiful lie. No Italian fisherman ever lived here. The Welsh architect Clough Williams-Ellis bought the wooded peninsula in 1925 and kept building his Mediterranean dream until he was well past ninety in the mid-1970s, designing most of it himself and rescuing the rest from demolition sites across Britain, an eighteenth-century colonnade from Bristol among them, then setting the pieces together like a living stage set. The result is less a village than an argument, that handsome building need not spoil a landscape, and it has been winning visitors over for a century. The piazza itself is smaller than the photographs suggest and is exhausted in an hour. What earns the ticket is everything around it: the Gwyllt, seventy acres of near-subtropical woodland thick with rhododendrons (best in April and May), some twenty miles of paths, and a shoreline walk above the Dwyryd estuary, which at low tide becomes a vast sandflat that the signs warn you firmly not to cross, because the tide comes back at a dangerous pace. Give it three hours at least, or you are paying twenty pounds for a photo stop. The village was the set of the 1960s series The Prisoner, which still brings a generation of Britons here on a small pilgrimage, and the famous Portmeirion pottery is sold in the village shops but made in Stoke-on-Trent, not here. For families: children adore the place because it plays like a giant toy, all narrow lanes, hidden stairs and doorways built deliberately smaller than life, but a pushchair becomes a burden once you leave the main tarmac route; slopes and stone steps run in every direction. There are cafes, an ice-cream parlour and restaurants inside, but the food is ordinary Western fare with no obvious halal options, and a picnic suits a family better. In July and August the car park can fill by midday and the village openly asks you to book online in advance, though the published prices are the same at the gate. In winter the gates close at 17:30 with last entry at 16:30, the woods are muddy and rain is near daily; it stays open all year except 25 and 26 December. Getting here from Snowdonia: the village sits on the edge of Porthmadog, just over 3 km or five minutes by car from the town centre. From Betws-y-Coed allow about fifty minutes via the A470 and A487, from Caernarfon about forty; parking is free, at the tollbooth right before the village entrance. Without a car, alight at Minffordd on the Cambrian Coast line or the Ffestiniog steam railway and walk the mile to the gate. Many pair it with Harlech Castle, twenty minutes south, or the steam train from Porthmadog in a single day.
A candy-coloured Italian square that a Welsh architect raised over fifty years, salvaged fragments worked in among his own designs, done in an hour.
Seventy acres of rhododendron and near-subtropical planting with twenty miles of trails, the part that turns a photo stop into a full day.
Views over the Dwyryd sands at low tide; lovely from above, dangerous to walk on as the tide returns fast.
Minffordd, Penrhyndeudraeth, Gwynedd LL48 6ER
Worth it if you give it three hours or more, including the woods and the estuary walk, and if you enjoy photography and architecture. If the plan is one photo in the piazza and back to the car, £56 for a family of four is steep for an hour, and the Ffestiniog steam train from Porthmadog, where children ride for a flat £5, gives them more fun for the money.
The main tarmac route from the entrance to the piazza works with a pushchair, slopes included, but beyond it lie stone steps, narrow passages and woodland floor, and the village itself says most of the woodland paths are unsuitable for prams because of protruding tree roots and uneven ground. A carrier beats a pushchair here, and children from about four or five love running the lanes.