Spent a sunny weekend in Tenby as a first-timer to Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

A few weeks ago, we spent a couple of days in Tenby, Wales and I genuinely think it might be one of the most unexpectedly pleasant places we’ve been in the UK. Especially because it was before the tourist season officially kicked in and we had beautiful sunny weather ALL weekend. We live in The Netherlands, so we will take sunshine whenever we can get it!

I had the complete wrong mental image of Wales before going (this was my first time). And I get that Tenby is not indicative of the rest of the country, but still... My partner has been to a few places in Wales for work but never to Tenby. We are trying to visit every European country while we are living abroad so it was nice to be able to experience Tenby together.

We arrived by train (we started in London) so we didn't have a car, which we totally did not need. Tenby is easy to navigate on foot because it's not very big and our Airbnb was only a ~5 minute walk from the train station.

Tenby is this small seaside town on the southwest coast with colorful buildings, old stone walls from the 1200s, tiny winding streets, tons of pubs and local shops, and it seemed like everyone had their dogs with them, which was awesome. We lost our 13 year old chocolate lab last year and so getting to make friends with other doggos is always a highlight of our travels.

We took a 1.5 hour boat trip around St. Margaret's Island hoping to see puffins, which we did! But definitely bring binoculars if you have them because, although we got pretty close to where the puffins were breeding, they still were somewhat hard to see from the boat. But we did have one floating pretty close to us so we got to check that off our bucket list.

We spent most of the afternoon wandering around the old town walls, went to Harbwr Brewery (tasty beers!) and walked up Castle Hill looking out over the water. There’s barely anything left of the castle itself, but the views are amazing (check out the above photos).

We also tried Welsh cakes for the first time, which were so good. The best ones we tried were from a place called Loafley. Highly recommend. They make them fresh to order and are really tasty.

One thing we both loved about Tenby was that it didn’t feel overly polished or manufactured for tourists. It just felt like people genuinely out enjoying a sunny day. Families at the beach, dogs everywhere, people drinking beers outside... Although we have heard from some locals that it's changed a lot over the years because they are catering more to the influx of tourists. But I guess that tends to happen to towns like this.

We know people usually talk about places like Edinburgh (which we loved!) or the Lake District when discussing UK trips, but Tenby deserves way more attention than it gets. Tenby was one of the friendliest places we’ve been to in a really long time and we really loved it.

I'm wondering if everyone else has had a similar experience in Tenby or if it had something to do with all the sunshine. 😉