The Pembrokeshire Peninsula and its beaches, such as Freshwater West
Croeso i Cymru!, it said on the poster. The words were unfamiliar to me, but I deciphered their meaning easily. had just left England crossing the fancy new bridge over the River Severn and that sign was my welcome to another country.
Born and raised in Briton, the tingle of travel excitement is a feeling I often experience on long adventures to exotic lands, outside the provincial confines of my United Kingdom .
Volkswagen van on a tour of North Wales
Still, there was no doubt I was in a different place. The names on the road signs attested to this: the town we call Monmouth in English was Trefynwy in Welsh. Bridgen was Pen-y-Bont, and Swansea Abertawe. In a garden the Welsh flag fluttered, half green, half white, with a flaming red dragon, the heraldic symbol of the country he had just arrived at.
Before crossing the Severn Bridge that day I had already been in Welsh two or three times. What he knew of the principality up to then could be condensed into a string of clichés including rugby (the national sport) , leeks (the national vegetable) , male choirs, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, even the Welsh language itself, a language with ancient roots that terrifies those who do not master it with its disconcerting appearance and unintuitive pronunciation – 'dd' is a soft 'th' in English, 'f' sounds like 'v' and 'll' is a scratchy throat.
But for some time now Wales has been creeping up into my consciousness. Conversations at parties. An Instagram photo or online video of a new restaurant on a huge, pristine beach. Call it the spirit of the times, or the strange realization that, for no reason, a place is suddenly relevant and interesting.
Definitely Wales with its unexploited coastline, enjoys a strong identity, and has done so for centuries with a compound of Celtic roots, a superb coastline, bustling cities and rugged mountains.
And reach the Llyn peninsula
My previous research discovered me the best and newest accommodations, and he tipped me off that the welsh cuisine – which has never been particularly well-liked beyond traditional oddities like its cawl soup, laver seaweed loaf, laverbread, and bara brith spiced tart – was rapidly evolving.
My plan was taking shape. At the end of July last year I prepared to make a road trip that would take me on a slow meander along the Welsh coast. If on the map Wales is the silhouette of a pig's head, I amused myself by the cheeks of the south coast , hovering around the snout the pembrokeshire peninsula to finally reach the tip of the Llyn peninsula , the soft ear of the pig, after having taken the pulse of Cardigan Bay, spread over the slope of the curve of her face.
At the ** National Museum **, a Victorian monster from Cardiff , the capital, I got my first impression of Wales as nerve center of history and preserver of cultural treasures shrouded in legend and romance. The museum's permanent collection, The Power of the Earth, served me well as a primer on the sublime beauties of the Welsh landscape and the smoke, grime and bustle of its mining heritage.
Right next door, in the City hall, I took a walk through the galleries, where commendable Welshmen were immortalized in cream-colored marbles and classic poses: Dafydd ap Gwilym, the 14th-century bard, clinging to his harp; Llewelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, the 'last prince' before the English wiped out the area's monarchy once and for all; and the most heroic of local heroes, the medieval freedom fighter Owain Glyndŵr.
Facade of the Walles Millennium Centre, in Cardiff Bay
Cardiff, once a rough and tough port city built on coal and sweat, has flourished to become the capital of a small but energetic nation.
During my morning jog from the Saint David's hotel To the white tower that stands like a ship on the shores of regenerated Cardiff Bay, I walk past the Senned, the Welsh Parliament building of Richard Roger, as well as the imposing Wales Millennium Centre, a national palace of culture in slab and steel where I stop to read the inscriptions engraved on the huge facade of the building. It is in two languages: in Welsh, 'Creu gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen' ('Creating truth like glass in the furnace of inspiration') and in English, 'In these stones horizons sing' ('In these stones sing The horizon') .
For my first meal I went to James Sommerin's namesake restaurant, in the small coastal town of penart : lobster with butter, dill and sweet corn, and Welsh lamb with coconut, cumin and mint. Until now, all delicious.
But he was impatient. On the M4 motorway, heading west, there was only traffic and boring service stations. In cosmopolitan Cardiff he had hardly heard anyone speak Welsh. Y I wanted to discover the mysterious landscapes of Wales, its ruined castles, haunting monuments and cobblestone villages in the depths of leafy valleys.
In the gower peninsula It was where I had my first contact with something wilder among the silent dunes that extend behind the salt marshes and in the narrow roads , so deep and narrow that the vegetation scratched the car as I passed.
Lobsters with melted butter, dill and sweet corn
Somewhat later, in Laugharne , I came across my first Welsh legend: poet and playwright Dylan Thomas, that he came to this beautiful coastal town with the intention of living a simple life away from society.
In his memory I drank a pint of a local sweet ale at the Brown's Hotel , the pub where the poet drank heavily and often, and strolled leisurely along the high path beside the estuary that leads to The Boathouse , the cabin where he lived with his wife Caitlin and his three children, whom he baptized with exemplary names of Welsh origin.
Home, overlooking the estuary, It was decorated in a simple old-fashioned provincial style, so beautiful that it becomes impossible not to envy the lifestyle of these bohemians of the 50s. Although the views were so mesmerizing that it is impossible to decipher how they managed to concentrate to work efficiently.
On a bench in the garden, an inscription engraved by Dylan's daughter, Aeronwy, reads: "The funny thing is, I find myself coming back again and again."
From Laugharne I continued along the coast westward, plunging into a maze of high-hedged roads that turned into green tunnels through ash and oak forests, with the sun dappling the road before emerging in the gentle countryside and the sea glinting at times over the top of a hill.
Café Mor, a beach bar set up inside an old van that works thanks to solar panels
Of the many surprises that West Wales had in store for me, one of the most delightful was Tenby , a port city with cobblestone streets winding up a port as beautiful as a postcard and with slate walls warmed by the evening light.
others were the stunning beaches. Pembrokeshire it has some wonderful ones that could compete with some of the best in Asturias or Galicia. For example: Freshwater West , vast and beautiful, with cattle grazing behind the sand dunes and a beach bar, Café Môr, which sells fresh crab sandwiches and lemonade from an abandoned boat on the beach.
It was also obviously helpful that in July 2018 the UK was experiencing what the British classified as a heat wave. Although a beach like Mwnt, with its little chapel on the headland, it would have been lovely in any weather. and the beach of barafundle –recently voted as one of the most instagrammable in the world–, which could be confused with a Minorcan cove thanks to its crystal blue sea and creamy white sand, too hot to be stepped on.
Here, in the pig's snout, I began to feel the thrill of Welsh magic. Beside the Norman cathedral of St. David's, In a small village that passes for a city, some cows grazed around the church. I walked through green meadows beside the romantic ruins of Bishop's Palace while the bells of Sunday morning echoed through the valley. Skylarks played and chirped in the air.
Barafundle Beach
I packed a picnic (teifi cheese, bara brith and a beer) and headed to the coast of Cwm Gwaun, a deep and dramatic valley where the small roads branch between closed villages and little gray churches.
Above Cwm Gwaun stand the Preseli mountains wide and bare, a place where the blue stones of Stonehenge they were excavated four thousand years ago. The Celtic cross in the Nevern churchyard was here before the Norman church next door and the Welsh engraved headstones. Even before the thousand-year-old yew tree that gave it shade!
It had taken me three days to completely leave the pervasive influence of England behind, but it was through this area that, finally, I felt the thrill of being in a genuinely foreign place.
in the districts around cardigan –area of agriculture and farmers–, Wales was breathed in the air of the streets, in the pubs. I even managed to understand some of what the road signs said, the names of the places and some of the conversations in shops and tea rooms: araf is 'slow', cwm means 'valley', bore da is 'good day' ' and diolch, 'thank you very much'; cranc is 'crab', while pont is 'bridge', an interface with Catalan that I will need a linguist to explain to me one day.
Harlem Castle
Igellau, the mountains of Cadair, they rose suddenly among the treeless crags of purple, green, and gold. North Wales is a small jungle with hills whose modest stature –the highest peak in the country, the Mount Snowdown, It barely reaches a thousand meters – it does not let its threatening power be seen.
The Harlem Castle , built by the English king Edward I in 1283 and captured by the Gallic rebel Owain Glyndŵr, has the solidity and majesty that a medieval castle should have, firmly ensconced on the bluff above Dwyryd Firth.
What I learned and loved about Wales is the curious way in which it unites, in a small geographical space, intimate and very small, a grandeur that can become intimidating.
Up here in the northern mountains, I found plenty of both. On one hand, I was the eccentricity of Portmeirion, a town whose tawdry colors and intense style, zigzagging between English Gothic and Italian Baroque, reflect the taste of its creator, local landowner Clough Williams-Ellis. They say that Portmeirion was inspired by a fishing village, but this surreal confection is pure theater, an artifice that has to be seen to be believed.
Portmeirion and his eccentricity
I wanted to end my wanderings in Wales with true nature, and not cultivated extravagance.
The heat wave had faded and both the land and the people breathed a sigh of relief. I drove by the Llŷn peninsula and came upon a front of summer mist and rain rising from the ground and a sea lurking invisibly on both sides of the road.
The beautiful town of Abersoch , near the end of the peninsula, with its brunch bars and cute boutiques, was the perfect spot for a family vacation.
But I preferred to choose aberdaron, a few miles further west, a cluster of fishermen's cottages, similar to those of Scandinavian seaside towns and one of those 'end of the world' places celebrated in Celtic folk sayings, such as Finisterre or Land's End.
As if I had planned it It was here that my own journey came to an end: at the tip of the pig's ear, where Wales looks out to the ocean and England seems a distant irrelevance.
Standing on the cape, I watched on the horizon the dark silhouette of Bardsey Island, once a sacred pilgrimage site and, as legend and myth tell, was the place where King Arthur was buried. It was then that I remembered Aeronwy, Dylan Thomas's daughter, brought back to Wales by a powerful undertow, the kind that messes with the sea. And, now that I think about it, I also see myself coming back here again and again.
_*This article and the attached gallery were published in the number 128 of the Condé Nast Traveler Magazine (May) . Subscribe to the print edition (11 printed issues and digital version for €24.75, by calling 902 53 55 57 or from our website ) and enjoy free access to the digital version of Condé Nast Traveler for iPad. The May issue of Condé Nast Traveler is available at its digital version to enjoy it on your favorite device. _
In the background, Bardsey Island