Discover Tenby

A walled fishing town that became Wales' seaside resort

Tenby sits on a limestone headland in Pembrokeshire, on the west side of Carmarthen Bay, and its Welsh name, Dinbych-y-pysgod (fortlet of the fish), is first recorded in a ninth-century poem. It grew into a Norman-era seaport that was sacked more than once, which is why the town paid for the defences that still ring the old town: the 13th-century walls, strengthened again in the 1450s under Jasper Tudor's Marcher lordship, and the Five Arches barbican gatehouse that is still the way most people walk into the old town today. Plague and civil war nearly finished Tenby off in the 1600s; the merchant banker Sir William Paxton restarted it as a resort from 1802, building sea-bathing houses and the arched harbourside road that still carries traffic, and Victorian Tenby grew up around that reinvention.

What that history left behind is a working town rather than a museum piece: a harbour that still sends boats out to fish and out to Caldey Island, three beaches inside a short walk of the walls, and 372 listed buildings packed into a small headland. Caldey Island itself, a mile and a half offshore, has been a Cistercian monastery since the 1920s (Celtic and medieval monks were there centuries earlier), and the crossing from Tenby harbour is one of the more unusual short boat trips on the Welsh coast: an island with its own working monastery, a beach, and a shop selling the monks' own perfume and chocolate.