Coast, hill and hidden history
Colwyn Bay
A broad North Wales bay where level promenade miles meet a tiny holy-well chapel, wooded hill paths and family days out.
- Best for
- Family beach days and coastal walks
- Give it
- A full day or a relaxed weekend
- Don't miss
- St Trillo's Chapel and the views from Bryn Euryn
Photo: Chris Andrews · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A seaside town with more than the seafront
Colwyn Bay combines a long sandy beach with hillside wildlife, parkland and short trips into Rhos-on-Sea's history.
Come for an easy promenade walk or beach time, then choose between watersports at Porth Eirias, the wooded paths of Eirias Park, the Welsh Mountain Zoo and Bryn Euryn's hillfort views. St Trillo's Chapel and two contrasting pubs add small-scale character around the wider bay.
Where to go
Places in Colwyn Bay
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesColwyn Bay Beach and Promenade
A long, level promenade beside the town's sweeping sandy bay, suited to walking, cycling and beach play.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Colwyn Bay seafront
Bryn Euryn Local Nature Reserve
Woodland and grassland paths climb to a 131-metre summit with an Iron Age hillfort, while an easier loop links Llys Euryn's medieval ruins with the hill.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 120 minutes
- Locality
- Rhos-on-Sea
Pen-y-Bryn
A hilltop gastropub with modern British food, local real ales, a garden and sweeping views over the sea and headlands.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Colwyn Bay
Food & drink
1 placeThe Toad
A traditional food-led pub that has served the bay for more than a century, with sea views, local real ales and a notably dog-friendly welcome.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- West Promenade
History & heritage
2 placesSt Trillo's Chapel
A tiny early-16th-century stone chapel, seating six, built over a holy well that still flows in front of the altar.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- Rhos-on-Sea promenade
St Paul's Church
A Grade II* active Anglican parish church built in stages from 1887 to 1911 to designs by Douglas and Fordham.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- Colwyn Bay
Things to do
3 places
Porth Eirias
A modern seafront centre for sailing, windsurfing, kayaking, paddleboarding and powerboat activities, with a children's playground and bistro on site.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Colwyn Bay promenade
Eirias Park
More than 50 acres of parkland with a boating lake, wooded paths, natural play, skateboarding, bowling, tennis and picnic areas.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Eirias, Colwyn Bay
Welsh Mountain Zoo
A 37-acre hillside zoo founded by naturalist Robert Jackson in 1963 and involved in conservation programmes.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 150 minutes
- Locality
- hillside above Colwyn Bay
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Three ways to explore Colwyn Bay
Signature outings
The chapel over the well
Enter a chapel scarcely larger than a small room and see the holy well still flowing in front of its altar.
Launch from Porth Eirias
Choose from kayaking, paddleboarding, sailing, windsurfing and powerboat activities at the promenade watersports centre.
Wildlife above the bay
Explore the 37-acre hillside zoo founded by naturalist Robert Jackson and involved in conservation programmes.
The town story
Colwyn Bay between chapel, hill and sea
The original Travel Fox article moves from the smallest details of the bay to the broad sweep of its coast, hillside and history.
The tiny chapel and the sweep of the bay
At Rhos-on-Sea, on the promenade a short walk west of Colwyn Bay proper, there is a stone chapel that measures roughly eleven feet by nine and seats six people. St Trillo's is reputed to be the smallest church in Britain. It was built in the early sixteenth century by monks from Aberconwy Abbey over a holy well that still flows in front of the altar, and the well supplied baptismal water for the whole medieval parish. One visitor put it plainly: "it is humbling to think that you are standing on a spot that has been the site of Christian worship for nearly 1500 years."
That is the far end of the bay. The town itself sits on a sweeping curve of coast with a 4.8km sandy beach, most of it imported by the millions of tonnes, and a long promenade you can walk or cycle on the flat for as long as your legs hold out.
Hillfort paths and pubs with a view
The town rises on wooded hillside between the sea and Pwllycrochan Woods, with the limestone hump of Bryn Euryn behind. Walk up Bryn Euryn and you reach a trig point at 131 metres among the scant remains of an Iron Age hillfort, with views taking in the Carneddau, Anglesey, Puffin Island and both Ormes. A gentler loop from the ruins of Llys Euryn — a medieval hall burnt during the Owain Glyndŵr revolt in 1409, three sides of which still stand with a chimney rising some fifty feet — runs about two miles through woodland.
For a pub, the one people send you to is Pen-y-Bryn, a Brunning & Price gastropub on the hilltop with sea views and a garden. It was built in 1983 by David Taylor, then manager of the Royal Hotel, who decided he wanted to build his own pub and did so partly from bricks salvaged from properties demolished to make way for the A55. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it "one of the best pubs not only in the Conwy area but in the whole of North Wales." Down on the West Promenade, The Toad has been serving for over a hundred years — dog-friendly to the point of offering a menu of dog treats, provided you shake the beach sand off first.
Markets, parks and family adventures
Shopping runs to the outdoor market on Station Road and Sea View Road, around fifty stalls on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and a monthly artisan market on the third Saturday from May to November. Poyntons the butcher has shops in Old Colwyn and Llandudno.
Families do well here. Eirias Park has fifty-odd acres, a boating lake and a natural play park; Porth Eirias on the front hires out kayaks and paddleboards; and the Welsh Mountain Zoo occupies thirty-seven hillside acres above the town, founded in 1963 by the naturalist Robert Jackson.
Arriving by rail and remembering the pier
Trains run from the town-centre station on the North Wales Coast Line, and the A55 puts Conwy and its castle a few minutes west.
The Victoria Pier hosted dances and touring bands until its last gig in August 2008. It partially collapsed into the sea in 2017 and was demolished the year after. A shorter one stands there now.
Stay around Conwy
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Conwy, linked directly to their property pages.
A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:Porth Eirias - geograph.org.uk - 6197717.jpg — photograph by Chris Andrews; Porth Eirias by Chris Andrews. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Colwyn Bay Beach and Promenade — visitconwy.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Porth Eirias — conwy.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Eirias Park — ffit.secure.conwy.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Welsh Mountain Zoo — welshmountainzoo.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Bryn Euryn Local Nature Reserve — conwy.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- St Trillo's Chapel — churchinwales.org.uk other published source
- Pen-y-Bryn — ratings.food.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- The Toad — thetoad-pub.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- St Paul's Church — churchinwales.org.uk other published source