5 Days in Cardiff

Cardiff Castle is three castles in one. The Romans first built a fort here around AD 55, and the line of their later 3rd-century fort is marked in red stone along the walls. The Normans raised the motte in the 1080s or 1090s, and the stone keep on top came in the 12th century. Then, in the 1860s, the 3rd Marquess of Bute, said to be the richest man in the world from his coal docks, hired the architect William Burges to turn the old lodgings into a Victorian Gothic fantasy.

Take the house tour for Burges' rooms: an Arab room with a gold ceiling, a nursery with fairy-tale tiles, a summer smoking room at the top of the Clock Tower. Then climb the keep for the view over the city, and walk through the long tunnels inside the walls, where up to 1,800 people sheltered during the bombing raids of the Second World War.

Behind the castle, Bute Park, the Marquess's old gardens, stretches north along the River Taff for more than 50 hectares, the green heart of the city. On the wall along Castle Street sit the stone animals of the Animal Wall: lions, a lioness, a bear, a seal, a hyena, a wolf, baboons and a lynx, designed by Burges for the Marquess and put up in the 1890s, with six more, among them an anteater, a pelican and a beaver, added in 1931 after the wall was moved.

The iron-and-glass Cardiff Market, opened in 1891, has been feeding the city ever since. Find the Bakestones stall, where Welsh cakes, flat griddle cakes with currants and sugar, are made in front of you and sold warm, and E. Ashton the fishmonger, who sells cockles and laverbread, the Welsh seaweed. Have lunch upstairs or from the stalls. Two minutes away on The Hayes, the free Museum of Cardiff in the Old Library tells the city's own story.

Cardiff calls itself the City of Arcades. From the 1850s to the early 1900s, the coal boom built a web of covered shopping arcades between the main streets: the Royal Arcade, from 1858, is the oldest, Castle Arcade, from 1887, has galleried shopfronts on two floors, and the Morgan, High Street and Wyndham arcades link the rest. They're full of independent shops, cafés and old-fashioned barbers.

In the Morgan Arcade is Spillers Records, founded in 1894, which claims to be the oldest record shop in the world. Whatever the truth, it's a fine place to browse.

Wales's national stadium, opened in 1999 as the Millennium Stadium, holds about 74,000 people and has a roof that closes, right in the middle of the city on the bank of the Taff. Rugby is the Welsh national game, and on international days the streets fill with red shirts and singing. The tour takes you into the dressing rooms and through the players' tunnel.

The City Arms on Quay Street, across from the stadium, is the classic rugby pub, packed and roaring on match days and a fine, old-fashioned pub the rest of the time, serving Brains, the Cardiff brewery's beer, since 1882. The Old Arcade on Church Street has walls covered with rugby history.

For music, Clwb Ifor Bach on Womanby Street, open since 1983, puts on bands over three floors and is the heart of Welsh-language music, with Womanby Street's other small venues around it.

Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, the granddaughters of a coal and railway magnate, spent their fortune on art and left it to Wales in the 1950s and 60s, and that's why National Museum Cardiff has one of the best collections of French Impressionists in Britain: Monet's water lilies, Renoir's La Parisienne, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Rodin. It's free.

The rest of the museum covers Welsh art, natural history and the evolution of Wales, from dinosaurs to the coal measures, a good background for the trip.

Next door, City Hall, opened in 1906, a year after Cardiff became a city, is the centerpiece of Cathays Park, a grand Edwardian civic center of white Portland stone laid out on land bought from the Marquess of Bute. Inside, when it's open, the Marble Hall has statues of the Heroes of Wales, unveiled in 1916, from Saint David to the medieval prince Owain Glyndŵr. Further into the park, the Temple of Peace, opened in 1938, was built as a memorial to the dead of the First World War and a call for peace.

Walk north through Bute Park and along the Taff Trail to Llandaff, a village inside the city with a green and a cathedral in a hollow by the river. Llandaff Cathedral was begun in 1107, ruined, restored by the Victorians and badly hit by a German bomb in 1941. When it was rebuilt, a concrete arch was put across the nave carrying Jacob Epstein's Majestas, a huge aluminum figure of Christ, unveiled in 1957 and still startling. Look also for Dante Gabriel Rossetti's triptych The Seed of David.

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff in 1916, and the sweet shop that inspired a story in his memoir Boy was on the High Street here.

Walk back to Pontcanna and Canton, the leafy neighborhoods west of the river that have become Cardiff's food quarter. Gorse, on Kings Road, won the city's first Michelin star in 2025 and cooks modern Welsh food. Heaneys, on Romilly Crescent, is in the Michelin Guide. Book both. For something easier, Kings Road Yard has a craft brewery taproom and pizzas, and Purple Poppadom on Cowbridge Road East is the critics' favorite curry house in the city.

St Fagans, opened in 1948, is an open-air museum where more than 40 buildings from all over Wales have been taken down stone by stone and rebuilt in the grounds of an Elizabethan manor: farmhouses, a woollen mill, a toll house, a chapel, a row of ironworkers' cottages furnished from 1805 to 1985, a miners' institute, and the Vulcan, a Cardiff pub of 1853, rebuilt here in 2024 and pouring again. It's free, and it was Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2019.

Don't miss Llys Llywelyn, a reconstruction of a 13th-century Welsh prince's court, and the bakery, which bakes bread in a traditional oven. Have lunch in the museum. You'll walk a lot, and you won't see it all.

Back in the city, take a bus to Roath Park, a Victorian park around a long lake with swans, rowing boats and a botanic garden. At the end of the lake stands a small lighthouse built in 1915 as a memorial to Captain Scott. His ship, the Terra Nova, sailed from Cardiff for the South Pole on 15 June 1910, and Welsh businesses had helped pay for the expedition. Scott reached the Pole in 1912 and died on the way back.

Walk south to City Road in Roath, Cardiff's "food mile": a long street of Turkish grills, Lebanese, Egyptian, Japanese and South Asian restaurants, cheap, good and where students and locals eat. It reflects the city that the docks built, with communities from all over the world. Try a mixed grill or a curry, and finish with Turkish sweets.

The Senedd, the Welsh Parliament, opened in 2006 in a building by Richard Rogers of glass, Welsh slate and Welsh oak, with a funnel in the roof that brings light and air down into the debating chamber. Wales voted for devolution in 1997, and since the 2026 election the Senedd has 96 members. You can walk in, sit in the public gallery, or book a free tour.

Next door, the red terracotta Pierhead Building, from 1897, with its clock tower, was the headquarters of the Bute Dock company, and now has a small free exhibition on the history of the docks.

The Wales Millennium Centre, opened in 2004, is the national arts center, home to the Welsh National Opera, under a bronze-colored steel roof shaped like a hull. Across its front, letters a meter high cut through the metal spell a line by the poet Gwyneth Lewis in Welsh and English: Creu gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen ("Creating truth like glass from the furnace of inspiration") and "In these stones horizons sing". At night the letters light up from inside. The foyer is free.

The white wooden Norwegian Church on the waterfront was built in 1868 for Scandinavian sailors and rebuilt here in 1992. Roald Dahl, whose parents were Norwegian, was christened in it. It's now an arts center and café. Nearby, a memorial to Scott's Antarctic expedition stands by the water.

Inland lies Butetown, the old docklands district known as Tiger Bay, one of Britain's oldest multi-ethnic communities, where sailors from Somalia, Yemen, the Caribbean, Norway and dozens of other countries settled from the 19th century. Shirley Bassey was born here in 1937. On Mount Stuart Square stands the Coal Exchange, built in the 1880s, where the price of coal for the world was once set. It's said that the first million-pound deal was struck here in 1904. It's now a hotel.

Walk along the waterfront and across the Cardiff Bay Barrage, a kilometer of dam with the freshwater bay on one side and the Bristol Channel, with one of the biggest tidal ranges in the world, on the other. Through the marina and up the hill, the path brings you to Penarth, a Victorian seaside town, about 5.5 km and 75 minutes from the Pierhead in all. Penarth Pier, opened in 1898, has an Art Deco pavilion from 1929, with views across the water to the islands of Flat Holm and Steep Holm and, on a clear day, England.

Stay in Penarth for dinner, in one of the restaurants along the seafront or on the streets above it, then take the train back to Cardiff Central, about 10 minutes. Have fish and chips on the front if you want something simple: in South Wales, ask for curry sauce on your chips.

Caerphilly Castle, begun in 1268 by the Norman lord Gilbert de Clare to hold off the Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, covers 12 hectares, the largest castle in Wales and second in Britain only to Windsor. It was among the first in Britain built on the concentric plan, rings of walls inside rings of walls, and its lakes, made by damming a stream, turned it into an island fortress.

The south-east tower leans about ten degrees, more than the Tower of Pisa, probably from subsidence or from Cromwell's men trying to blow it up after the Civil War. The Great Hall reopened in 2025 after a major restoration, with a new roof and furnishings.

The town gave its name to Caerphilly cheese, a crumbly, mild, slightly salty white cheese that miners took down the pits for lunch because it kept well. Most of it is now made in England, but Welsh farm cheesemakers still make the real thing. Have lunch in the town, ideally with some of the cheese, before heading on.

Rising out of a beech wood above the Taff gorge, Castell Coch, the "Red Castle", looks like something out of a fairy tale, and it is, almost. The 3rd Marquess of Bute and William Burges, the team behind Cardiff Castle, built it in 1875-91 on the ruins of a 13th-century castle as a summer retreat, with conical towers and interiors painted with birds, butterflies, monkeys and the stars. It was hardly ever used. From the bus stop in Tongwynlais, it's a steep 15-minute walk up through the woods.

Back in Cardiff, end with Welsh food. The Welsh House on High Street serves Welsh dishes all day: cawl, the national lamb and leek broth, Welsh rarebit, Glamorgan sausages and Welsh lamb. It's a small Welsh chain, so for something more independent try one of the Pontcanna restaurants from day two. Then a last pint of Brains SA, known locally as "Skull Attack", or a Welsh whisky from Penderyn, before the singing starts.