Pete's Eats serves its tea by the pint, in mugs sized for people who have just walked up a mountain or are about to. It opened in August 1978, named after Pete Norton, who ran it for forty years, and it became one of the best-known mountaineering cafés in Britain — big, cheap, filling food for climbers, and enough of a landmark that the New York Times sent someone in 1996 and reported it cheap, filling and rowdy. Norton retired in 2018, and after the Covid lockdowns the café closed in September 2022. A local, Nick Pritchard, bought it and spent the best part of three years refurbishing; it reopened in November 2025. For a village of two thousand people, keeping the café alive was not a small undertaking.
That is Llanberis in one building: a place organised entirely around the mountain above it. Yr Wyddfa — Snowdon — rises 1,085 metres to the south, and the village sits at its foot on the shore of Llyn Padarn, in a glacial valley strung between two lakes. Arrive down the A4086 and you get the whole picture at once: the water, the ruined tower of Dolbadarn Castle, the grey stepped terraces of the old slate quarry, and the bulk of Snowdon closing the head of the valley.
The Heights, on the High Street, is the walkers' and climbers' pub — bar, café and bunkhouse in one, with three changing real ales and a large garden and terrace. The food is hearty and comes in large portions: beef lasagne, spaghetti carbonara, meat pies, with the Yorkshire pudding and the sticky toffee pudding singled out by regulars. The bunkhouse rooms draw more mixed reviews, cold and basic by some accounts, but nobody comes to the Heights for the soft furnishings.
The Padarn, in the village centre, is a hotel and bar a hundred metres from the lake and five minutes' walk from the Snowdon Mountain Railway. Two miles up the pass at Nant Peris, the Vaynol Arms is the older kind of Welsh long-house inn — slate floor, open fires, Robinsons ales, home-cooked food, and outdoor-pursuit equipment from throughout the ages nailed to the walls. It has been a stop for walkers and climbers at the head of the pass for a very long time.
The Llanberis Path is the longest of the six routes up Snowdon, about nine miles there and back, and the least steep, which is why it takes more than four in ten of everyone who climbs the mountain. It starts in the village by the roundabout outside the Royal Victoria Hotel and climbs steadily beside the railway, past the Halfway House café, the Clogwyn Du'r Arddu viewpoint, and a steeper boulder stretch known locally as Allt Moses, before joining the Snowdon Ranger and Miners' Track routes at Bwlch Glas for the final pull to the summit cairn and Hafod Eryri. Eryri National Park grades it Hard, which is worth remembering. Least steep is not the same as easy.
The other great walk goes up too, but not to the summit — into the quarry. From the country-park car park by the lake, a path climbs through the abandoned galleries, inclines and buildings of the Dinorwig slate quarry, one of the largest in Wales and now popular with rock climbers. On the way you pass the Anglesey Barracks: two rows of eleven tiny two-room cottages built in the 1870s high on the hillside for quarrymen who lived too far to walk home, many of them from Anglesey, which is where the name comes from. Up to four men shared each cottage, with no running water or electricity. They were used until 1948, when a health-and-safety inspection condemned them as unfit for human habitation. They stand roofless now, a forgotten street above the lake.
Down at lake level the walking is flat. Llyn Padarn is one of Snowdonia's cleanest lakes, good for open-water swimming, kayaking and paddleboarding, with beaches, woodland and a lakeshore path running beside the little steam railway. The lake holds Arctic char, a fish left behind by the last Ice Age and still surviving here.
The village has three railways, all of them for pleasure rather than transport, which is its own kind of comment on a place that lost the real one. The passenger branch line closed in 1932. The Snowdon Mountain Railway, opened in 1896, is Britain's only public rack-and-pinion railway and climbs 4.7 miles from the village to the summit. The Llanberis Lake Railway runs narrow-gauge steam along the north shore of Llyn Padarn through Padarn Country Park, and was extended into the village centre in 2003.
The Snowdon railway's first day did not go to plan. On 6 April 1896, on the first public descent, locomotive No. 1 — named L.A.D.A.S. — lost the rack, ran out of control, derailed and fell down the mountain. A passenger from Llanberis, Ellis Griffith Roberts, jumped from a carriage, struck his head as he landed and died; it remains the railway's only passenger fatality. The inquiry blamed settlement of the newly built track and excess speed. A gripper system was fitted, the trains were made lighter, and the line has run ever since.
The National Slate Museum sits in the quarry's original Gilfach Ddu workshops, free to enter, though it closed in late 2024 for a major renovation and is due to reopen in 2026 — worth checking before you go. Its centrepiece is a De Winton waterwheel built in Caernarfon in 1870, just over fifty feet across, the largest working waterwheel in mainland Britain and second in the UK only to the Laxey Wheel on the Isle of Man. The quarrymen's cottages beside it were taken down stone by stone at Tanygrisiau, near Blaenau Ffestiniog, and rebuilt on the site. Nearby is the quarry hospital, put up by the owners in 1860 so that injured men did not have to make the long trip to Bangor; in 1900 it was among the first hospitals in Britain to own an X-ray machine, which is still there as an exhibit.
Dolbadarn Castle, a short walk from the village and free to reach, was built by Llywelyn the Great in the 1220s or 1230s to guard the pass. Its round tower held Owain Goch ap Gruffydd for more than twenty years, imprisoned by his own brother. Within a couple of years of the English conquest, Edward I had timber stripped from it, around 1284, to help build Caernarfon Castle seven miles west. In the 1790s Turner painted the tower with the captive Owain lit from a window; the resulting oil was one of his two Royal Academy Diploma works, and Richard Wilson and Paul Sandby came for the same view before him.
The quarry made the modern village. Dinorwig was the second-largest slate quarry in Wales, and therefore the world, after neighbouring Penrhyn; at its height, at the start of the twentieth century, the Welsh slate industry employed around 17,000 men. St Padarn's Church was built in 1884 and 1885 because the growing quarry town needed a church of its own, funded by the Assheton Smith family who owned Dinorwig. It is Grade II* listed, local stone with pink sandstone dressings and a blue-slate roof, and inside it stands a late-medieval font carried over from the old church at Nant Peris — the original mother church of the parish, dedicated to Saint Peris, who is said to have settled and died there. Slate production at Dinorwig ended in 1969. In July 2021 the whole slate landscape, Llanberis included, became Wales's fourth UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The best-remembered person from the village is Marged ferch Ifan, baptised in 1696, known as the "Queen of the Lakes." She was a harpist, wrestler, blacksmith and carpenter, reputed to be able to shoe a horse, build a boat and make her own harp or violin, and to out-wrestle any man into her seventies. The story goes that when the bridge at Nant Peris was built, she held up one end of a giant slate slab while all the men of the village held the other. The Flintshire writer Thomas Pennant recorded her in his Tours in Wales; she and her husband ran a drinking house for the copper miners.
Llanberis is a strongly Welsh-speaking place — around seven in ten residents speak the language — and the tie between the language and the slate is not incidental, since the poets, novelists and singers came out of the quarrying community. Gutyn Peris the poet, the novelist and broadcaster Thomas Rowland Hughes, and Marc Lloyd Williams, the Welsh Premier League's all-time top scorer, all came from here. The A4086 still runs through the pass to Pen-y-Pass and the A5 to the east; the Snowdon Sherpa buses link the village to the trailheads; the nearest mainline station is Bangor, about nine miles off.
The Llanberis mountain rescue team is called out 150 to 200 times a year, which tells you something about a village of two thousand people sitting at the foot of the busiest mountain in Wales. And every summer the Snowdon Race — first run in 1976, after Ken Jones of Llanberis proposed it to the carnival committee, and eighty-six runners turned up — sends people ten miles up the Llanberis Path to the summit and back down again. The men's record was set by Kenny Stuart in 1985, at one hour, two minutes and twenty-nine seconds, and forty years on nobody has beaten it.
