Book Direct | B&Bs & Guest Houses in Aberystwyth

More About B&Bs in Aberystwyth

The promenade runs between the castle ruin and Constitution Hill. Up on the hill behind, the National Library of Wales holds a copy of nearly everything published in Britain and Ireland, and it costs nothing to walk in.

The streets behind the front are narrow and full of small places to eat. Ultracomida on Pier Street has been serving Spanish food and cheese here for years. The Aberystwyth and Ceredigion County Show, one of the biggest one-day shows in mid Wales, still runs every year on the second Saturday of June.

The big gothic building on the Aberystwyth seafront started life as a speculation and ended up a university almost by accident.

Thomas Savin, a railway contractor, bought Castle House in 1864 and set the architect J. P. Seddon to turning it into a grand hotel. The plan was to run excursion trains down to the coast and sell the fare and the room together.

It opened in June 1865 with the work unfinished, and it did not last. Savin went bankrupt in February 1866. A few months later Overend, Gurney and Company, the London bank that lent to railway builders, collapsed and took the money markets down with it. The building was left standing half-done above the beach.

A committee had been trying for years to found a university in Wales, and in March 1867 they bought the building for £10,000. Seddon was brought back to finish what the money would stretch to, and the college opened on 16 October 1872 with three teachers and twenty-six students.

A fire started in the chemistry laboratory in 1885, killed three people and gutted much of it. It was rebuilt, and it has been known ever since simply as Old College.

The other institution the town won is up on the hill behind it. The National Library of Wales is one of a handful of libraries entitled to a copy of everything published in Britain and Ireland. Walking in costs nothing. The reading rooms need a reader’s ticket, which is also free — sign up online or at the desk when you arrive. It shuts on Sundays.

Between the two, the town has more going on than a seaside place this size usually manages, and it does not shut down out of season.

The resort itself came with the railway, which reached Aberystwyth on 1 August 1864. The Royal Pier opened the next Good Friday, and seven thousand people paid to walk to the end of it on the opening day. The terraces behind the front went up to house them, and they are what most of the guest houses are in now.

Those terraces are why the streets behind the promenade look as they do: tall, narrow and built in a hurry for visitors. Most of the town is walkable from them, so the car can stay put.

Eating is easy here. Pysgoty on the South Promenade cooks fish landed by local boats, and Baravin on Marine Terrace opens at ten for coffee and stays on for supper.

Out of the town, the Rheidol valley climbs to Devil's Bridge and Borth's long flat sands are six miles north. Aberystwyth Comedy Festival takes over the town from 2 to 4 October 2026 with about a hundred shows, and rooms behind the front go early for it.