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More About Hotels and Inns in Saundersfoot

The bay faces south-east and keeps its sand calm and sheltered, which suits children and slow mornings. A room high on the hill buys a long view over the harbour and out to sea.

Everything sits close together: the harbour, the beach and the shops are all a short walk apart. Tenby is three miles south along the coast, with an open-top bus in summer if you would rather leave the car.

The house on the hill above the village is built of what the coal ships brought home. Hean Castle looks medieval but is not. The oldest part went up around 1840, and when the London solicitor Charles Ranken Vickerman bought the place in 1863 he had it rebuilt. The Manchester architects Pennington and Bridgen did the work in 1875 and 1876.

The stone is a red sandstone from Runcorn in Cheshire, brought here as ballast in the colliers going back for another load. The turrets you can pick out from the bay are Victorian, and the house is private, with no public opening.

Vickerman did the same thing twice. In the late 1870s he took the village inn on the High Street and gave it battlements to match his own house. So the coal owner’s mansion and the local pub ended up in the same costume.

The inn had been built around 1840 as the Picton Castle Inn, named for the estate whose land it stood on. For a time it was leased by the Saundersfoot Railway and Harbour Company, so the railway ran the village pub.

By 1887 it had been renamed the Hean Castle Hotel, though the listing record says there is no known connection with the castle. It has been closed for some time, and its future is uncertain.

Vickerman died in 1897, and his son sold the estate two years later to Sir William Thomas Lewis, later Lord Merthyr. Lewis was one of the great coal owners of south Wales. His wife Anne died at Hean Castle in 1902, and the house has stayed in the same family since.

The village punches well above its size for a place with so few hotels. St Brides Spa Hotel, on the cliff above the harbour, was named in 2026 in The Times’ fifty best places to stay in the United Kingdom. Only five entries in the whole list were Welsh.

It also took the AA Hotel of the Year award for Wales in 2025, the first in the country to win it twice. Its restaurant holds two AA rosettes, and its infinity pool looks straight out over the bay.

Its ownership changed hands in a way you do not often see. In May 2024 the Port of Milford Haven bought it: the harbour authority, not a hotel group. It came from the family who had built it up over twenty-four years. It is now managed on the port’s behalf by an operator with several other Pembrokeshire properties, and every job was kept on.

The money has gone back into the building since. The bedrooms were all redone through 2025, and the spa gained a salt room, an outdoor sauna and a spa pool. Six apartments in the grounds and fourteen in the village were stripped back and handed over in June 2026 for the summer.