Portmeirion and its Village People

TV series don’t get much more surreal than 1960s smash The Prisoner.

Nearly 50 years since the show went off air, its fans still don’t know why main character ‘Number Six’ – played by Patrick McGoohan – abruptly quit the British Secret Service, triggering a sequence of events which saw him drugged, kidnapped and imprisoned in ‘The Village’.

The series was filmed in Portmeirion, the Italianate village in north Wales designed. Built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (above), its pastel-coloured cottages, villas and picturesque piazzas provided a perfectly psychedelic backdrop for Number Six’s repeated, but futile, attempts at escape.

Today, fans of The Prisoner visit to get in to Portmeirion, not to escape it. All the locations seen in the series remain completely unchanged and Number Six’s house is even a Prisoner-themed souvenir shop ! The only difference of course is that when modern day visitors wish to leave, there’s nothing stopping them…

every destination has a story to tell

Recommended places to stay: Castell Deudraeth, Portmeirion.

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