Why Wales’s 100-year old seaside village is every bit as charming as Portofino

At the entrance to Portmeirion Village, I was asking for directions to the hotel when I noticed two plump robins standing inches from my foot. “You get used to them,” I was told. “They follow you when you walk around the village.” Later, I was sitting on a bench in Portmeirion’s central piazza, and I was joined by three more robins and four blackbirds, all an arm’s length away. If I had brought some crumbs, I’m pretty sure I could have had them eating out of my hand. Tame wildlife is just one of the layers of Portmeirion’s otherwordly atmosphere. You shell out your £20 entrance fee and step into another dimension. One minute you are in North Wales, the next you could be almost anywhere. The landscape is Eryri-on-sea, but the architecture – narrow cobbled walkways, arches, loggias, rustic pantiles, ice cream-coloured stucco – is Portofino with accents of Provence. Even the plant-life looks Mediterranean. Shorts Add 70 acres of subtropical woodland, the zig-zag of leafy paths that weave around the “Gwylt” (“wild” in Welsh), a Japanese garden, a Victorian pet cemetery, a giant chess board and an obsession with the 60s TV classic The Prisoner (filmed here), and you have the perfect ingredients for a European-feeling autumn break without the need for a passport. Yet Portemeirion is a village like no other. Nobody really lives here. A century ago, its founder, the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, set out to prove that it was possible to build a model holiday resort without spoiling the natural landscape. He started his Arcadian vision in 1926, after acquiring the former Aber Iâ estate, a “neglected wilderness”, set on a rocky peninsula overlooking the creamy sands of the Dwyryd estuary. He was 93 when he finished the last building half a century ago. Williams-Ellis borrowed from different architectural styles, thus his creation is a mish-mash of Italianate, Palladian, Baroque and Gothic, with a bit of Welsh vernacular thrown in, alongside some “Cloughed-up” Victorian originals. In order to give a genuine sense of history to new buildings, he bought many of his materials as architectural scrap. An Italianate bell tower, with a chiming turret clock, is the relic of a demolished London brewery and is set into stone salvaged from the 12th-century castle that once stood on the estate. The so-called town hall features recycled Jacobean panelling and mullioned windows from Emral Hall in Flintshire. The colonnade, an elaborate pillared loggia, was once the grand facade of a Georgian bath house at Arnos Court in Bristol (the bomb-damaged monument was reconstructed at Portmeirion in 1956 and is Grade II listed). Almost every corner has a story to tell. One of my favourites is a statue of a gilded Buddha – a relic of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, a 1958 movie starring Ingrid Bergman filmed in North Wales, which stood in for North China. Portmeirion is packed with classical architecture (Photo: Visit Wales) One of the most impressive is the vast fireplace, designed by Victorian architect Norman Shaw, which was transported from Cheshire to make a two-storey Gothic porch for the front of the village’s impressively domed pantheon. The most famous (or at least, the most photographed) is the piazza: an eccentric ensemble of pillars, statues, topiary and exotic plants arranged around a pool, it was completed only a year before The Prisoner started filming in 1966. You don’t need a history lesson to be charmed by Portmeirion. People come just to see the gardens – and the great banks of flowering rhododendron which light up the estate’s woodland in early summer. The first thing to strike me (aside from the ever-so-friendly birds) was the colours. In the world outside, the villages of the Eryri National Park are all dark stone and slate; here the cottages come in candy-floss pinks, ochre, cobalt and aquamarine; they are decorated with trompe l’oeil murals, and feature cute diamond-paned windows, bright-painted shutters and weatherboarded cladding. In the summer, there are avenues of hydrangea in co-ordinating pastel shades. In autumn, the Japanese garden in particular is a feast of rich colour. Arranged on a terraced cliff, this fairy-tale village tumbles down to the estuary shoreline, where the Portmeirion Hotel overlooks the beach and the Amis Reunis, a stone ship, furnished with remnants of a wrecked trading ketch, permanently moored on the quay. From here, I followed the coast path, past the observatory tower, under the arches beneath White Horses cottage (where Patrick McGoohan stayed during filming) and up to Sir Clough’s lighthouse folly, a tiny tin tower topped by an upturned pig boiler. Enjoy a Mediterranean holiday in the UK (Photo: Keith Freeburn/Visit Wales) Portmeirion Hotel, open since 1926, is the original estate’s manor house and has rooms with four-poster beds, an Art Deco-style dining room, redesigned by Terence Conran in 2005 and a series of “village suites” housed in nearby cottages. Most of the village is given to accommodation of one sort or another. I stayed at Castell Deudraeth, which has 12 contemporary rooms in a Victorian-Gothic castle just outside the village gates. ­Little more than a shell when it was portrayed as The Prisoner’s sinister village hospital 60 years ago, the hotel now has oak floors, under-floor heating, a splendid suite with a tower room and brasserie that spills into a walled garden. Aside from free entry to the village, all overnight guests get the place to themselves when the day trippers drift away. Portmeirion in full swing is often busy and, like any resort, has its fair share of retail opportunities. You can eat fish and chips at the town hall, a 50s-diner style café bar, order a pizza at Caffi Glas, teas and light lunches at Caffi No 6, take away street food at Caffi’r Ddraig or try Caffi’r Angel’s own Italian-style gelato. The Portmeirion Hotel’s dining room serves modern Welsh cuisine in a more formal setting. Shopping is geared towards gifts and souvenirs: the village’s own-brand fragrances (“capturing the essence of Portmeirion”) from The Ship Shop; Welsh produce from the Pot Jam pantry; and a range of pottery (the famous china, created by William-Ellis’s daughter, Susan, now made in Stoke-on-Trent) at Siop Fawr in nearby Porthmadog. There is also a Prisoner Shop, housed in the colour-washed cottage where Number Six was incarcerated – and if you’re staying the night, you can watch all 17 episodes in your room. I watched a few in my Castell Deudraeth bedroom. But try as a I might, I couldn’t summon an iota of the malevolent atmosphere portrayed by the fictional village of the series; and I certainly didn’t want to escape, as Number Six did. The hardest part of my visit was leaving, waving goodbye to the friendly robins on the way out. Admission £20 for adults, £14 for children. Hotel rooms from £235 a night half-board, self-catering cottages £585 for a three-night stay, portmeirion.wales