Cardiff Hotels

More About Hotels and Inns in Cardiff and the Vale

Many big stadiums sit out by a motorway junction. Wales put the Principality Stadium in the middle of the city. On a match day you can leave the car where it is, join the crowd at the end of your own street and walk in with them. The singing starts long before the ground. On days with nothing on, you can go inside the stadium on a tour.

Not every hotel is in the middle. Thornhill is on the hill north of the city. Llantwit Major sits above the Glamorgan cliffs, and Laleston is in farm country beyond Bridgend.

The castle in the middle of the city belonged to the Bute family, who owned the docks that shipped the coal out. In the 1860s the third Marquess was said to be the richest man in the world. He found an architect called William Burges who would take him at his word, and between 1868 and Burges’s death in 1881 they held nothing back.

Along the pavement outside the castle, the Animal Wall has fifteen stone animals looking over it at the traffic, and it is free to see.

Inside, one room has a ceiling of gilded and mirrored glass. There is a roof garden with a tiled fountain, and a room at the top of a tower with a map of the world set into the floor. The Norman keep is a separate climb up its own mound, with a view over the whole city. Allow two hours for the lot, and more if the house tour is running.

The castle walls are thick enough to have tunnels running through them, and Cardiff used those as air-raid shelters. More than eighteen hundred people could get in at once, with bunks, kitchens and a first aid post. You can walk through them now, and the names people scratched on the stone while they waited are still there. The castle’s website lists what each ticket covers.

Burges and the Butes did it again at Castell Coch, ten minutes north of the castle. There Burges raised a round-towered fantasy on the stump of a medieval ruin in the trees above Tongwynlais. The painted drawing room is worth the trip on its own, and it is open to visitors.

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, on the north-western edge of the city. He was christened in the little wooden Norwegian church at the docks, which is now a café and gallery you can walk into. He went to the cathedral school. The sweet shop where he and his friends dropped a dead mouse into the gobstopper jar is still in Llandaff, with a plaque on it.