Cardiff Bay & the Wales Millennium Centre
About
The old Tiger Bay docklands, reinvented as a freshwater waterfront when the barrage sealed the bay in 1999, and now the second pole of the city. The set pieces stand shoulder to shoulder: the Wales Millennium Centre, the national arts centre whose copper-and-slate front carries a giant bilingual inscription and whose foyer is free to wander; the red-brick Victorian Pierhead building; the Senedd, Wales' parliament, with free public access; and Roald Dahl Plass, the sunken oval plaza named for the Cardiff-born author. Add Mermaid Quay's restaurants, the boardwalk, and the shrine to Torchwood's Ianto Jones that fans still maintain by the water, and it earns a half day. Trains from Queen Street to Cardiff Bay station take four minutes, or come by water bus from Bute Park.
Photos
Highlights
- ✓Wales Millennium Centre's copper front and free foyer
- ✓The Senedd, open to visitors
- ✓The Victorian Pierhead building
- ✓Roald Dahl Plass and the Doctor Who and Torchwood filming sites
Tips
- →The bay is impounded freshwater behind the barrage, so ignore any instinct to check tide times; the water level barely moves.
- →Catch a show at the Millennium Centre if you can; the building is best experienced full.
- →The 4-minute rail shuttle from Queen Street to Cardiff Bay station is the quick way down; the water bus is the scenic one.
Best Season
More Attraction Activities
Cardiff Castle
Roman walls, a Norman keep and Burges' gilded Victorian Gothic apartments, in the middle of the shopping streets.
National Museum Cardiff
Free national museum: Monet and the Davies sisters' Impressionists upstairs, dinosaurs and a whale skeleton downstairs.
St Fagans National Museum of History
Wales' free open-air history museum: a whole village of re-erected Welsh buildings in the grounds of an Elizabethan manor.