We love Gower – and so does The New York Times!

Sometimes it’s easy for us to take too much for granted what’s right on the doorstep at Bayview, Oxwich. We’re a little blasé about the fact that Gower has it all: glorious beaches, dramatic cliffs, ancient woodland, marshes, moorland, castles, churches and culture. All this packed into a peninsula that’s so compact you really can have everything when you come to visit. No wonder it was the UK’s first ever Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB 1956).

No surprise then when it was recently lauded in The New York Times ‘52 Places to Love in 2021’. Readers of this quality press were invited to write about the spots right across the world that have ‘delighted, inspired and comforted them in the dark year’ that was 2020.

The newspaper received over 2,000 suggestions, and right there in the top 52 was Gower, a place described by contributor, Owen Martikan, a lawyer who lives in California, as making him feel he was ‘in a place set apart’ when he has visited previously.

This is what he had to say:

Over the past 20 years I’ve travelled to south Wales about seven or eight times with my wife, and later our children, to visit family in a town near Swansea called Mumbles. (the name is a corruption of the French word for ‘breasts’). It sits at the edge of the Gower peninsula – a beautiful wild place that offers expansive beaches, medieval castles, hilltop trails, horses that graze near Stone Age ruins and picture-book villages with friendly pubs serving Sunday roasts and local ales in dark-wood booths.

Mumbles is homey and welcoming, yet we never saw tourists there. The roads are so small and narrow that getting from one place to another feels like it’s much farther than you actually travel.

Punctuated by weddings, births, graduations, anniversaries and deaths, our trips represented different stages in our lives. But each trip also seemed less like a visit to relatives in the old country than an escape to a secret, beautiful place that only we knew.

Gower fortunately remains a well-kept secret but we’d love you to share it with us as soon as conditions allow. With three architect-designed detached rental houses, two luxury apartments, and a selection of semi-detached bungalows, we’ve got something to suit everyone, so come and see what The New York Times has been raving about.

Photography by Philip Griffiths nb-design.com