Book Direct | Hotels & Inns in Conwy

More About Hotels and Inns in Conwy

Walk the walls first, which cost nothing and give you the best view of the place you will get. Give the afternoon to Plas Mawr, the Elizabethan townhouse Robert Wynn built between 1576 and 1585, open March to early November. Then take a boat off the quay before dinner.

The valley behind the town runs south towards the mountains, past Rowen, with Betws-y-Coed at the head of it and Bodnant Garden about twenty minutes up. Llandudno is ten minutes the other way along the coast, and the station in the town is on the main coast line.

In 1826 Thomas Telford threw a suspension bridge across the mouth of the Conwy, directly beneath the castle walls, and the town stopped being a place you waited at.

The Conwy bridge is the quieter of Telford’s two great crossings on this coast, and the more carefully mannered. Rather than build something that would argue with the castle it stands beside, he gave the towers battlements and turrets so the bridge reads as an extension of the walls. The span is ninety-nine and a half metres and it cost fifty-one thousand pounds.

It carried traffic for a hundred and thirty-two years. Vehicles came off it on the 13th of December 1958, and the National Trust has looked after it since 1965. It is listed Grade I, the highest grade there is, and you can still walk across it.

2026 is its two hundredth year, and Cadw is running anniversary tours to mark it. They leave from the East Barbican at Conwy castle with a qualified guide at ten, twelve and two, and cost five pounds a head on top of castle admission.

Staying in the town puts all of that on foot. The castle opens every day of the year apart from Christmas and New Year, and Cadw, the Welsh Government’s heritage body, charges a pound to anyone on Universal Credit and admits disabled visitors and a companion free.

One thing to know before you plan a day around it: three quarters of a mile of town wall survive with twenty-one towers on them and they are free to walk, but the stretch between the Watch Tower and the Wing Gate is shut for safety work, and Cadw hopes to have it open again in time for Easter 2027. A good many guidebooks still promise the full circuit.

For an evening, the quay is five minutes downhill and the boats run off it from February to October when the tide allows.