Pwllheli Accommodation

More About Pwllheli

The rest of the town faces the sea. There is a four-hundred-berth marina at Hafan Pwllheli, and the Welsh national sailing academy stands beside it. The South Beach runs a mile along Cardigan Bay behind. The Cambrian Coast railway ends here.

This is a working Welsh town rather than a resort, which is much of its charm. Llanbedrog and its painted beach huts are three miles west. Abersoch and the boats are seven miles on, and Aberdaron at the tip is under forty minutes away. The Cambrian Coast line runs from here to Machynlleth and on to Shrewsbury.

In August 1925 the National Eisteddfod — Wales’s national festival of music and poetry — came to Pwllheli. While it was on, a handful of men sat down in a café called Maes Gwyn, just off the market square, and founded a political party.

They did it by merging two small nationalist groups, one led by Saunders Lewis and one by H. R. Jones, and its first aim was a Welsh-speaking Wales. It took the name Plaid Cymru in 1945. The party came back to Pwllheli in June 2025 for its hundredth birthday, and a plaque marks the spot.

The town is still overwhelmingly Welsh-speaking, and you will hear that on the square on a Wednesday. Fruit and vegetables, plants, tools and clothes go out on fifty-odd stalls, on ground that has held a market for six hundred and seventy-one years.

The charter came from Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III, who is remembered as the Black Prince. He never became king, but the right he granted the town in 1355 is still being used every week.

The seaside half of Pwllheli is a Victorian bolt-on. In 1893 a Cardiff businessman called Solomon Andrews bought the South Beach estate and built the West End: promenade, hotel, bandstand and cycle track. He then ran a horse tramway three miles along the shore to Llanbedrog so that his visitors had somewhere to go.

A storm wrecked the tramway in 1927 and it never ran again. The promenade is still there, and so is the beach, running a mile east from the harbour mouth.