Edward I built Caernarfon to hold Wales down. The walled town, the polygonal castle towers said to imitate the walls of Constantinople, the colour-banded masonry that Welsh stonemasons quarried for their English overlords - all of it was raised between 1283 and 1330 to make a permanent statement about who now ruled Gwynedd. Seven centuries later, you can stand on the Maes - the market square at the foot of the castle - on a Saturday morning and overhear nothing but Welsh in three directions. Caernarfon never agreed to be conquered. It simply rebuilt itself in Welsh around the symbols of English power.
Long before Edward, this stretch of the Menai Strait was already a contested boundary. The Celtic Ordovices farmed and fought along the Seiont valley until the Romans arrived around AD 78 and built the auxiliary fort of Segontium just south of the modern town. The Roman garrison stayed for three centuries. After they left in 382 the area passed into the Kingdom of Gwynedd, the most stubborn of the Welsh principalities. William the Conqueror tried to plant a Norman motte-and-bailey here in the late eleventh century and was driven out. Wales remained independent for another two hundred years. In 1282 the Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd refused to do homage to Edward I; by 1283 he was dead and his country was Edward's. The new castle and town walls went up immediately, designed by the master mason James of St George, and Edward's fourth son was born inside the castle in April 1284 - the future Edward II, made the first English Prince of Wales in 1301.
Granted royal borough status by Queen Elizabeth II in 1963 and amended to Royal Town in 1974, Caernarfon today has a population just under 10,000 - small by English standards, substantial by north Welsh ones. According to the 2011 census, 85.8% of residents were born in Wales (one of the highest proportions in Gwynedd), and 77% reported a 'Welsh only' national identity. The community has the highest concentration of Welsh speakers anywhere in Wales. Locals call themselves Cofis and speak a distinct dialect peppered with words used nowhere else - the kind of micro-vocabulary that survives only in places that have never stopped speaking the language. Bilingual signs are the norm, Welsh-first wherever the council can swing it, and the town twins with Trelew in Argentine Patagonia, the descendants of nineteenth-century Welsh emigrants who carried Caernarfon dialect to the southern hemisphere.
On 1 July 1969, Caernarfon Castle hosted the investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales - a televised ceremony attended by the British royal family inside a thirteenth-century shell deliberately reframed as a stage set. The political reaction in Wales was sharp. Protests filled the streets. Two members of the militant group Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (the Welsh Defence Movement), Alwyn Jones and George Taylor, were killed when their bomb - intended for the railway line at Abergele to stop the royal train - exploded prematurely. The movement's leader, John Jenkins, was later arrested after a tip-off and sentenced to ten years. The ceremony went ahead. The casualties did not. Cardiff had already become the capital of Wales in 1955 - in the local-authority ballot, Caernarfon lost 11 to 136 - but the investiture turned the older town into the symbolic stage anyway, with all the unresolved feeling that implied. In July 2019, a Welsh independence rally drew between 5,000 and 8,000 people through the same town square.
Caernarfon's economy runs on tourists, civil servants and small enterprise. Gwynedd Council is headquartered here on Shirehall Street. The pedestrianised Pool Street and Castle Square - the Maes - carry most of the retail; Doc Fictoria, the Victoria Dock redevelopment opened in 2008, sits beside a Blue Flag beach marina and holds the maritime museum, an arts centre, restaurants and bars. The old public houses are still working: the Castle Hotel, the Anglesey Arms, the Twthill Vaults, and the Black Boy Inn, which has stood inside the town walls since 1522. The current spelling of the town's name only stabilised in 1975. The county was spelled 'Carnarvon' until 1926; the borough became 'Caernarvon' that year; the community became 'Caernarfon' fifty years later by order of Arfon Borough Council. The English spellings dropped one consonant at a time as Welsh reasserted itself in the official record.
Geography is doing some of the cultural work. Caernarfon sits on the eastern shore of the Menai Strait, facing Anglesey across narrow water; Snowdonia (Eryri in Welsh) rises directly to the south-east, with the summit of Snowdon less than ten miles from the town centre as the crow flies. The town's natural harbour at the mouth of the Afon Seiont is small but sheltered, and the castle stands at the river's mouth like a stone bookmark. Bangor is eight and a half miles to the north-east; Porthmadog is nineteen miles to the south. Driving in from any direction, you come down out of mountains or across a strait, and Caernarfon presents itself the way it has for seven centuries - banded stone towers above a working harbour, with Welsh in the air.
Caernarfon lies at 53.14 degrees north, 4.27 degrees west, on the eastern shore of the Menai Strait at the mouth of the Afon Seiont. From the air the polygonal towers of Caernarfon Castle and the complete circuit of medieval town walls are unmistakable, with Anglesey visible immediately across the strait and Snowdon rising 9.6 miles to the south-east. Best viewed at 2,000-4,000 feet. Caernarfon Airport (EGCK) is four nautical miles south-west; RAF Valley (EGOV) lies 15 miles north-west on Anglesey - watch for Valley MATZ and active fast-jet training.