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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
National
Andrew Forgrave & Bradley Jolly

Coach full of tourists turned away after driving 150 miles to 'Britain's best beach'

A coachload of tourists travelled for four hours to "Britain's best beach" - only to get turned away.

When the group arrived at Porth Iago, north Wales, beach bosses told them the site was too small to accommodate them and they wouldn't be able to get in.

So they had to travel the 150 miles back to Birmingham disappointed, reports North Wales Live.

Site manager, Chris, who asked for his surname to be withheld, said: "People have begun coming in coaches but we’re not a big site and there’s no way we can allow that.

"Last summer, a coach party from Birmingham called to ask if they could come and we said that, unfortunately, they couldn’t. They came anyway, so we had to turn them back. They drove all the way back to Birmingham."

The small, sheltered beach was a huge attraction to tourists in the 1970s but its popularity has soared again since the COVID-19 pandemic and through the rise of social media.

The golden beach is surrounded by amazing landscapes, views of dolphins and an incredible sunset.

But other requests at Porth lago have also rejected in the last couple of years. A couple wanted to book the entire site for a wedding in 2022 but this was denied.

Lonely Planet named Porth Iago as the best wild camping beach in Wales, while the Sunday Times called it the Llŷn Peninsula’s “prettiest beach”. Last year, the campsite won the North Wales category of Channel 4's The Perfect Pitch series.

The entire 2023 camping season was booked up even before the end of the last one. Many are regulars who, once on the roster, return year after year. The oldest is aged 94, a great-grandmother who visited with her parents, probably not long after the farm fields were first opened up to campers in 1934. Now she stays for eight weeks each summer, bringing three generations of the family with her.

“Others have been returning here for 50 or 60 years,” said Chris.

“A teacher comes every school holiday and some retired people come for a few days almost every week.”

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