Tenby

I’ll admit Tenby caught me off guard. I’d seen the photos everyone posts — that row of candy-colored Georgian houses stacked above the harbor — and assumed it would be one of those places that photographs better than it lives. It isn’t. We arrived at low tide, when the harbor’s fishing boats were sitting canted over on wet sand instead of floating, and the whole scene had this slightly surreal, suspended quality that no picture had prepared me for.

The town is still wrapped in its medieval walls, which is not a metaphor — you actually walk through a stone arch, the Five Arches gate, to get into the old town, and the walls just keep going, following the headland around toward the castle ruins on Castle Hill. We climbed up there in the early evening and watched the light go gold over Caldey Island sitting out in the bay, with its monastery that the monks apparently still run, making chocolate and perfume of all things. I liked knowing that was out there while we stood on a 13th-century wall eating ice cream from a shop that had clearly been selling ice cream to bored kids for generations.

What I keep coming back to is how much the tide runs the show here. Come back four hours later and North Beach is this enormous flat expanse of firm gold sand stretching out toward Goscar Rock, and suddenly the town’s whole relationship to the sea has changed — kids flying kites where boats had been bobbing that morning, dogs sprinting after balls across what used to be seabed. Lia and I walked the full length of it barefoot, which I do not recommend doing while also trying to carry shoes, a phone, and a bag of chips, but it was worth the juggling.

We ate dinner one night at a pub tucked just inside the walls, the kind of low-ceilinged place where you have to duck through a doorway that clearly predates anyone tall, and had a proper Welsh rarebit that put the version I’d made at home to shame. Tenby does tourism well without quite losing itself to it — the ice cream shops and gift stores are there, sure, but underneath it there’s still a working harbor town that’s been doing this, in one form or another, since the walls went up.

When to go: Summer brings the warmest sea and the busiest streets; if you’d rather have the beach and the harbor views without the crowds, aim for May, June, or September and check the tide times before you plan your day.