Wales Southern Attractions

South Wales is a popular holiday region, with many seaside resorts, idyllic coastal areas and delightful hills, in which many places bear witness to this country's important past. However, heavy industry here is in crisis. While in 1951 the steelworks of the British Steel Corporation in Port Talbot were prized as being the most modern in Europe, the present recession and structural problems are causing the last two state-subsidized steelworks to face an uncertain future. Along with the traditional heavy industry, other manufacturers, predominantly of chemicals and textiles, have recently settled here, as have computer and electronics firms, all of which are looking to expand.

South Wales therefore has many facets. It encompasses the counties of Gwent (formerly Monmouth), Glamorgan (divided into West, Mid and South Glamorgan) and the southern part of Dyfed (the former counties of Carmarthen and Pembroke).

South Wales is a region with a favorable climate. Thanks to the Gulf Stream its winters are mild, there is little rain between January and June, and the coastal area enjoys many hours of sunshine. There are more than 80 beaches, from wide bays to small rock-enclosed coves, many of them almost deserted, others crowded with holiday-makers in summer.

Geologically South Wales mainly comprises ranges of hills running in an east-west direction as in Brittany, in contrast to North Wales with its north-south Caledonian-style formations. The late-Tertiary folding caused by a damp warm climate and extensive denudation through heavy rain and weathering was followed in the Pleistocene period by a glacial coating of the land through three ice ages, the Anglian, Wolstonian and Devonian. The glaciation centers were Snowdonia, the Brecon Beacons and the inner Welsh plateaux.

In Anglo-Saxon times Wales was the retreat of the Celts who had arrived in the British Isles in 800 B.C., founded the first towns and built fortresses (the "Celtic Hill Forts") on the plateaux. The valleys were also settled by the Romans, who extended the fortresses; they were followed by the Christian Irish, and subsequently the Normans, from whose fortress sites and settlements came today's villages and towns. Characteristic of the settlement and land utilization of South Wales are individual farms, with groups of trees and intensive agricultural activity immediately surrounding them, otherwise the land is predominantly left as pasture. Only after Henry VIII was the right of inheritance of farms introduced, which led to the reparceling of the agricultural land within communities, since beforehand gavelkind had always resulted in an increasingly large division of what was owned. In contrast to England, where sheep rearing is mainly carried out for the production of wool, Wales also plays an important part in the provision of meat.

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	View over the Wye Valley at Symonds Yat.