Museums and Galleries, Historic Buildings and Gardens, Nature and Wildlife

Portmeirion Village and Gardens

Portmeirion, Gwynedd LL48 6ET

Tel: 01766 770000 Fax: 01766 771331

website: www.portmeirion-village.com

Few places in Wales, or indeed anywhere else, are as fascinating as Portmeirion, the brainchild of the inspired Welsh architect, conservationist and tireless campaigner for the environment Sir Clough Williams-Ellis. On his own private peninsula on the coast of Snowdonia, he designed Portmeirion to show how a beautiful place could be developed without spoiling it. He transformed the site into a largely Italian-inspired fantasy, building some properties and rescuing others from elsewhere and rebuilding them here. Nothing is ordinary, and visitors will find a surprise at every turn - a castle, a lighthouse, a bell tower, a town hall, a triumphal arch, a tollgate, grottoes, statues and colonnades.

Clough Williams-Ellis opened the main house as a hotel, and from the start Portmeirion attracted the famous; Noël Coward wrote Blithe Spirit while staying here in 1941. The hotel has 14 guest rooms, and 26 more are spread among the houses and 11 in Castell Deudraeth, a superbly modernised Victorian mansion. There are restaurants and several shops, two of them selling the famous Portmeirion pottery and one selling memorabilia of the cult TV series The Prisoner, which was filmed here. The woodland gardens are an attraction in their own right, and beautiful gardens also surround the Clough Williams-Ellis ancestral home at nearby Plas Brondanw.

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