Dylan Thomas called SWANSEA (Abertawe) - his birthplace - an "ugly, lovely town", an epithet which poet Paul Durcan updated to "pretty, shitty city". Both ring true. Large, sprawling and boisterous, it is the second city of Wales, with around 200,000 people, and has great aspirations to be the first; it's certainly far more Welsh than Cardiff. The city centre was massively rebuilt after devastating bomb attacks in World War II, and a jumble of tower blocks now dot the horizon. But closer inspection reveals Swansea's multifarious charms: some intact old corners of the city centre, the spacious and graceful suburb of Uplands, a wide seafront overlooking Swansea Bay and a bold marina development around the old docks. Spread throughout are some of the best-funded museums in Wales. Situated on the edge of the Gower peninsula , which holds some of the country's most popular and inspirational coastal and rural scenery, Swansea makes a logical base: transport out into the surrounding areas is good, and beds tend to be less expensive in the city than in the more picturesque parts of Gower.

The city's Welsh name, Abertawe, means the settlement at the mouth of the River Tawe, a grimy ditch that is slowly being teased back to life after centuries of use as a sewer for Swansea's metal trades. The first reliable mention of Swansea dates from 1099, when a Norman castle was built here as an outpost of William the Conqueror's empire. A small settlement grew near the coalfields and the sea, developing into a mining and shipbuilding centre that, by 1700, was the largest coal port in Wales. Copper smelting became the area's dominant industry in the eighteenth century, soon attracting other metal trades to pack out the lower Tawe Valley, making it one of the world's most prolific metal-bashing centres. Over the years, the valley became a five-mile stretch of rusting, stagnant land and water that has only recently begun to be re-landscaped