Portmeirion

Portmeirion looks like a little piece of Italy transported to Wales. It has a piazza, a campanile, and an eclectic mixture of cottages and buildings squeezed into a small space and surrounded by gardens full of subtropical plants and ornate pools. The village is a mass of color—the façades are terra cotta, bright pink, yellow, and cream, and the gardens full of brightly colored flowers and shrubs. Portmeirion was the realization of a dream for Sir Clough Williams-Ellis who bought this wooded hillside plot above the broad sandy river estuary and built the village to show that architecture could be fun and could enhance a beautiful site, not defile it. His architectural model was Portofino and, while there are many Italianate touches to this fantasy village, there are also lots of local recycled houses. Sir Clough rescued many old buildings and cottages from destruction (he termed Portmeirion “the home for fallen buildings”), transporting them here and erecting them on the site. Day visitors are charged an admission fee but if you really want to fully enjoy the fantasy (the setting for the BBC television series The Prisoner), spend the night at the hotel or in one of the rooms in the village and enjoy it after the visitors have left.