🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Wales and Northern Ireland
Cardiff, the capital of Wales, is one of those cities that surprise you with how much they pack into a small space. Right in the centre stands a castle with almost two thousand years of history, surrounded by an enormous park; a few blocks away, covered Victorian and Edwardian arcades — the best in the United Kingdom — hide cafes, bookshops and independent shops; and a short walk from the river is the Principality Stadium, the great temple of Welsh rugby, wedged between buildings as few stadiums in the world are. Everything is walkable, warm and on a human scale.
But Cardiff was not always a capital or a big city. Its modern history was written by coal: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the port of Cardiff was the largest coal exporter on the planet, and the Butetown district, beside the docks, became one of the oldest and most multicultural communities in the United Kingdom, the legendary Tiger Bay. That dockside, after decades of decline, is today Cardiff Bay: a freshwater bay with promenades, restaurants, the spectacular Wales Millennium Centre and the Senedd, seat of the Welsh Parliament born with devolution in 1999.
This guide covers Cardiff with a practical, warm eye: the castle and the arcades, the free museums (the National Museum, with one of the best Impressionist collections in Europe, and St Fagans, an unmissable open-air museum), Cardiff Bay, the stadium tours and trips to the storybook castles of Caerphilly and Castell Coch. With the Welsh language on every sign and a national pride you can feel on rugby days, Cardiff is the best gateway to Wales.
Cardiff began as a Roman fort (Caerdydd) built around the first century AD beside the River Taff, on whose site the Normans later built a castle at the end of the eleventh century. For centuries it was little more than a small medieval port, until the Industrial Revolution transformed it: the Bute family funded the docks and railways that turned Cardiff into the world's largest coal-exporting port at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the multicultural district of Tiger Bay (Butetown) growing up beside the basins. The collapse of the coal industry sank the port, but Cardiff was officially named capital of Wales in 1955, reinvented itself with the regeneration of Cardiff Bay in the 1990s and 2000s, and with devolution in 1999 became the seat of the Welsh Parliament (the Senedd) and the heart of a revival of the Welsh language and culture. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Two Celtic nations with intense histories: Wales, land of the last independent princes, of coal and of a language on the way back; and Northern Ireland, marked by the Plantation of Ulster, the partition of 1921, the Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Read the history of Wales and Northern Ireland →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Under the lawn and the walls of Cardiff Castle, right in the city centre, there are almost two thousand years of history stacked on top of each other. The first chapter was written by the Romans: around the middle of the first century AD (sources cite a date around the year 55) they built a fort beside the River Taff, at a strategic point for controlling the territory of the Silures, the British tribe of south Wales. In fact several forts of different sizes followed one another on the same site through the Roman occupation. That origin is probably where the city's name comes from: Caerdydd would derive from 'Caer' (fort) on the Taff, although it has also been suggested that it honours a Roman general.
After the Roman withdrawal from Britain, the place slipped into the background through dark centuries about which little is known. The great leap came with the Norman Conquest. Around 1081 William the Conqueror is recorded as passing through the area, and in 1091 the Norman lord Robert FitzHamon began building a motte-and-bailey castle, reusing the old Roman walls. A small borough grew up around that stronghold. In the twelfth century the castle was rebuilt in stone, with a keep on the mound that you can still climb today. Cardiff was thus born as a Norman frontier stronghold in the 'Welsh Marches', a territory disputed between Anglo-Norman lords and Welsh princes.
Through the Middle Ages and the early modern centuries, Cardiff was little more than a modest walled town with its castle, its river port and its market. It received a borough charter and prospered quietly on maritime trade across the Bristol Channel, but it was never a big town. Its population stayed small for hundreds of years: even at the end of the eighteenth century it was only a few thousand people.
Like the rest of Wales, the area lived through the upheaval of Owain Glyndŵr's revolt at the beginning of the fifteenth century — the last great Welsh rebellion against English rule — and the later administrative integration of Wales into the English kingdom through the Laws in Wales Acts of 1536 and 1543, under Henry VIII. Cardiff became the main town of the county of Glamorgan. The castle changed hands among various noble families over the centuries, and in the middle of the eighteenth century it ended up in the hands of a family that would prove decisive for the city's fate: the Butes, marquesses of Scottish origin. The first Marquess of Bute hired fashionable landscape designers and architects to turn the old residence into an elegant Georgian mansion and to landscape its grounds. But the real revolution would come not from the castle's stone but from a black mineral hidden in the mountains to the north.
The history of modern Cardiff is, to a large extent, the history of coal. In the valleys north of the city — Rhondda, Cynon, Merthyr Tydfil — the Industrial Revolution uncovered one of the richest coal and iron fields on the planet. All that production needed an outlet to the sea, and that is where the Bute family came in. In 1825, the second Marquess of Bute began a risky and hugely expensive series of investments in Cardiff's docks, building the great basins (the Bute Docks) which, connected by rail and canal to the valleys, turned the city into the great export terminal for Welsh coal.
Growth was dizzying. Cardiff went from town to city in a few decades; its population multiplied again and again through the nineteenth century. The port became the largest coal exporter in the world: at its peak, in 1913, more than 13 million tonnes of coal left its docks. The wealth it generated was immense. Cardiff's Coal Exchange, in Mount Stuart Square, was where world coal prices were set, and it is said that the first million-pound contract in history was signed there. The Butes, who owned much of the land, were among the richest men in the world.
With that fortune, the third Marquess of Bute could afford an extraordinary indulgence: he commissioned the eccentric architect William Burges to remodel Cardiff Castle, turning its interiors into a neo-Gothic fantasy of gilding, murals and carved ceilings, and also building, in the woods nearby, the small and dazzling Castell Coch. The city also gave itself a splendid civic centre at Cathays Park, with the City Hall and the National Museum, a symbol of a city that wanted to match its new importance.
The rise of the port drew sailors and workers from all over the world. Beside the docks, in the Butetown district, one of the oldest multicultural communities in the United Kingdom grew up, popularly known as Tiger Bay. From the middle of the nineteenth century, people from more than fifty countries settled there: Somalis, Yemenis, Cape Verdeans, Caribbeans, Greeks, Irish, Chinese, Maltese, sailors from West Africa and from half the world, who arrived with the ships and often stayed.
It was a poor, overcrowded district — houses were subdivided and sublet to cover the rent, especially around Loudoun Square — but also a place of enormous cultural vitality, with its clubs, its music and a mixing of origins and religions unusual for the time. Out of it came, among other figures, the singer Shirley Bassey, a daughter of that dockside melting pot. Tiger Bay is recognised as the oldest multi-ethnic community in Wales and one of the first in the country.
The memory of that district has not always been treated fairly: the community suffered discrimination and episodes of racial violence, such as the riots of 1919 that hit several British ports. And in the second half of the twentieth century, 'urban renewal' plans demolished much of old Butetown and scattered its residents. Today, the history of Tiger Bay is reclaimed as an essential and proud part of Cardiff's identity, and its legacy lives on in the Butetown community beside the bay.
The twentieth century brought first the peak and then the blow. After the high point of 1913, the coal industry went into a long decline: international competition, oil, wars and economic crises gradually closed pits and emptied the docks. By the middle of the century, the port that had been the largest in the world in its field was in clear decline, and the docks were left half abandoned.
And yet, in the depths of that industrial slump, Cardiff gained a recognition it had long been chasing. In 1955, after years of debate and a consultation with the Welsh local authorities (in which Cardiff beat rivals such as Caernarfon and Aberystwyth), the city was officially proclaimed capital of Wales, the first recognised capital in the country's history. It was an enormous symbolic change: for the first time Wales had a formal capital, and Cardiff began to gather national institutions.
The great physical rebirth came at the end of the twentieth century. With the old port area run down, one of the largest urban regeneration projects in Europe was set in motion. The key piece was the Cardiff Bay Barrage, a barrier completed in 2001 that dammed the rivers Taff and Ely and created a large freshwater lagoon where there had been tidal mud. On that new waterfront came promenades, housing, restaurants and landmark buildings such as the Wales Millennium Centre, the great Welsh arts venue opened in 2004. Old Tiger Bay was becoming modern Cardiff Bay, not without controversy over what was lost along the way.
The last great chapter in Cardiff's history is political and cultural. In 1997, a referendum approved by the narrowest of margins the creation of a National Assembly for Wales, as part of the process of 'devolution' (the transfer of powers) driven through in the United Kingdom. In 1999 the Assembly was opened, based in Cardiff, and began meeting in Cardiff Bay. In 2006 the Senedd building opened, the work of Richard Rogers' practice, a transparent, open building with plenty of Welsh timber and an undulating roof, conceived as the symbol of a parliament close to the people. Over the years the institution gained powers and in 2020 it was renamed Senedd Cymru / Welsh Parliament, with legislative capacity of its own in many areas.
Cardiff thus settled into being a real capital: seat of the Welsh government and parliament, of the public media (BBC Wales, S4C, the Welsh-language channel), of cultural institutions and of the national sport, with rugby as the great collective passion at the Principality Stadium. For years the city was also an important television production centre, famous for being the base of series such as Doctor Who.
Alongside this, Wales has been through a remarkable revival of its language. Welsh (Cymraeg), one of the most widely spoken Celtic languages, had been retreating for generations, but promotion policies, bilingual education, Welsh-language media and a declared target of reaching a million speakers have brought it back to life. In Cardiff, a traditionally more English-speaking city, the language is increasingly visible: Welsh-medium schools, bilingual signs everywhere and a growing pride in a distinct identity. From Roman fort to the world's coal port, from Tiger Bay to a capital with a parliament, Cardiff sums up the whole history of Wales in a few kilometres.