Book Direct | Caravan Parks & Camping on the Llŷn Peninsula

More About Caravan Parks on the Llŷn Peninsula

Get down to the sand before the car parks fill. Walk out to a headland in the evening, when the light goes gold over the sea and the mountains turn blue behind you. Abersoch has the sailing and the surfing. Pwllheli has the marina and the shops. Morfa Nefyn has a beach you walk down to, past a row of old fishermen's houses.

Go west and the road runs out at Aberdaron, the last village before the open sea. Go east and Porthmadog puts you on the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland steam railways and at the foot of the mountains, so a wet day always has somewhere to go.

The biggest holiday park here began as a naval barracks. In 1940 the Royal Navy opened a training camp at Penychain, just east of Pwllheli. They called it HMS Glendower, because the Navy names shore bases as though they were ships.

It was put up for them by Billy Butlin, the holiday-camp owner, on a contract letting him buy it once the war was over. He did, in 1946, and it opened to holidaymakers the following year.

Not everyone was pleased. The local council and four Welsh MPs argued about what a camp that size would do to a quiet Welsh-speaking corner. It went ahead, and brought the peninsula its first big wave of visitors.

It ran as a Butlin’s camp for forty years. Today it is Hafan y Môr, Welsh for haven of the sea. The holiday-park company Haven runs it now.

Holidaymakers arrived in their thousands from Manchester, Liverpool and the Midlands, and the trade spread out of Pwllheli into Llanbedrog, Abersoch and Nefyn. Most of the parks that line this stretch of Cardigan Bay date from that wave.

The draw today is the same one it has always been. Abersoch faces east into a sheltered bay, calm enough for children to swim and learn to sail, and you can still watch the yacht club racing on a Saturday.

At the eastern end of the peninsula, near Porthmadog, Morfa Bychan has a second kind of beach altogether. Black Rock Sands still runs two miles, and it costs a few pounds in season to take a car onto the sand.

The season here still runs longer than people expect. Many parks stay open from March to early November. A week at either end costs a fraction of an August one, with the same sand and no queue at the lane end.