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 Brightly Coloured Buildings of Tenby
This popular, genteel seaside town is as beguiling as its Welsh name, ‘Dinbych-y-Pysgod’ meaning Little Fort of the Fishes.
 Rainbow at Tenby,Image © Wales Tourist Board
Tenby is the largest town along the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and boasts some of the widest and best stretches of beaches and a quaint little harbour and seafront of pastel coloured Georgian town houses.
Though it does get overpopulated in peak season Tenby still retains a sense of gravitas that many other seaside resorts in the UK had long since exchanged for amusement arcades and fish and chips.
Tenby was originally the sight of a Welsh fort on the promontory of Castle Hill but was acquired by the Normans in the late 11th Century who later enclosed the town on its landward side with a defensive wall following attacks by the Welsh. A substantial portion of this 13th Century wall still remains.
Tenby quickly grew as in the 14th and 15th Centuries as a trading port with boats travelling to and from Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and across the Bristol Channel to England , but by the 18th Century Tenby fell into decline.
However local magnate Sir William Paxton of Middleton Hall (now home of the National Botanic Gardens of Wales) turned the town’s fortunes around. He promoted Tenby as a fashionable saltwater bathing resort building up the Georgian houses of the town. By the early 19th Century Tenby was the resort of choice for wealthy visitors attracting artists like J.M.W. Turner and Augustus John. The arrival of the steam train later brought day-trippers and a new range of amusements with a pier and bandstand built to commemorate Queen Victoria ’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
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