Sea View Stays in Pembrokeshire: Where the View Is Real

"Sea view" is the most elastic phrase in holiday lettings. It has been used for a grey sliver visible from the corner of a back bedroom if you stand up.

This is about the other kind — rooms where the water is the thing you look at — and where on this coast to find them.

Pick your coast by the light

Pembrokeshire faces three different ways, and it changes the whole character of a stay.

West. St Brides Bay: Broad Haven, Little Haven, Newgale, and round onto the St Davids peninsula. This is sunset country. The sun goes down into the water in front of you and midsummer evenings run past ten.

The cost of that is exposure. Everything the Atlantic does arrives here first. That's the reason to come in October and the reason the windows have salt on them in February.

South. Tenby, Saundersfoot, Manorbier, Freshwater East. More sheltered, blue-water light through the middle of the day, and Caldey Island sitting in the view to give it a middle distance. Sunrise rather than sunset — worth knowing if one of you gets up early and one doesn't.

North. Newport, Fishguard and Goodwick. Estuary and headland rather than open ocean, with hills behind. From the Parrog at Newport you get water in front and Carn Ingli behind, which is the best two-directional outlook in the county.

Where the genuine ones are

They cluster, because they were built to.

Tenby's Esplanade and South Cliff terraces went up in the nineteenth century specifically for the view and still have it. The hillsides above Saundersfoot harbour do the same job. Upper Solva sits high over the inlet with St Brides Bay beyond. The Parrog at Newport is a row of houses on the estuary. Around Broad Haven and Little Haven there are clifftop houses scattered along the top.

What you won't find much of is new building on the coast. National Park planning has kept this shoreline largely unbuilt, which is the reason the views are worth having and also the reason the handful of properties with the best of them price high and book a year out. Those two facts are the same fact.

Reading a listing sceptically

Phrases that mean less than they sound like:

• "Sea glimpses" — a sliver, from one window, in winter when the tree is bare.
• "Coastal views" — may well be fields that happen to be near the coast.
• "Moments from the beach" — not a unit of distance.

What to look for instead:

• A photograph taken through the sitting room window, with the window frame in shot. If every view photo is frameless, it may have been taken from the garden gate.
• More than one room described as sea-facing.
• A map pin or postcode you can check yourself. Two minutes on satellite view will tell you whether there's a caravan park, a hedge or a road between the house and the water, and whether the ground actually falls away.

Then look at the contour. A house on a slope 200 metres back can have a far better view than one at sea level 50 metres away with a bungalow in front.

The cheaper route

If the clifftop house is out of reach, take a cottage a street back and spend the difference on being outside instead. A table at the front in Tenby, a pint at the sea wall in Little Haven while the sun goes down over St Brides Bay, a flask at Strumble Head watching for porpoises on a rising tide.

The best sea views in Pembrokeshire are on the Coast Path, and nobody charges for those.

Browse sea view places to stay, the beaches, or when to come.