Variously described as a tourist village and an architectural fantasy, it was the brainchild of architect Clough William Ellis. He bought a peninsula on the coast of Snowdonia, in north Wales, in 1925 and spent the next half-century designing more than 40 buildings and importing parts of others. These decorate a ravine with massive rock outcrops. Adjoining it are a garden and woods filled with rhododendrons and exotic plants and trees.
The result has been likened to a Mediterranean village. But even Mediterranean villages have plain-looking buildings, a description that applies to few of Portmeirion's structures, which include a bell tower, an octagonal domed building called the Pantheon, gatehouses, two buildings that straddle driveways, a pavilion, a piazza with statuary and sculpted shrubs, a lighthouse, an observatory tower, even a triumphal arch.
Although they may not look it, most are houses and cottages containing self-catering accommodation that can be rented.
Noel Coward wrote Blithe Spirit while staying in one of them, called Fountain, in 1941.
There are also two hotels. One -- called Y Gwesty -- is a former summer home facing the coast that was built in 1850. The other, Castell Deudraeth, a restored mansion, opened in 2001.
The architectural styles are all over the map -- Classical, Gothic, Palladian -- and the colours are strong -- raspberry, peach, turquoise, ochre, yellow, blue. They're the original shades, and can't be changed because virtually all the buildings are Grade 2 in Britain's Listed Buildings System.
You can't take in all of Portmeirion in one visit. I had been there before and kept running across things I missed the first time.
Like the 17th-century plaster ceiling in the town hall that once adorned a stately home some distance away. Ellis bought it at auction and had it, and parts of the mansion, transported to Portmeirion and reassembled.
Or the Bristol colonnade, hundreds of tons of masonry brought in pieces more than 300 km by road and put back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Or the gilded statues of Burmese dancers atop Ionic columns and the smiling Buddha from the set of the movie Inn of Sixth Happiness, filmed nearby.
"You see something different every time you come here," our Welsh guide told us.
In Britain, Portmeirion is probably best known as the setting of the 1960s TV series The Prisoner. Starring Patrick McGoohan as a recently resigned secret agent who has been kidnapped and taken to a place called The Village, it became a cult classic.
Fans visit Portmeirion every year to dress as series characters and be chased along the seafront by huge balloons similar to ones used in the show to prevent McGoohan's character from escaping. The next Prisoner convention runs April 8-10.
Portmeirion is open daily except Christmas. For details, see portmeirion.com.
denglishtravel@gmail.com
Disney Fantasy to sail next spring
