Caerdydd Audioguides

Cardiff, known in Welsh as Caerdydd, only became the official capital of Wales in 1955, which makes it one of the youngest capitals in Europe despite sitting on a site that Romans fortified in the first century AD. The city grew explosively in the 19th century on coal money: Cardiff was the world's largest coal exporting port at the turn of the 20th century, and the wealth of that trade built Cardiff Castle's extravagant Victorian Gothic apartments designed by William Burges for the Marquess of Bute. The castle itself, built on Roman and Norman foundations in the center of the city, is one of the most theatrically decorated Victorian interiors in Britain, its rooms painted floor to ceiling in a riot of gold, lapis, and medieval imagery.

The Cardiff Bay regeneration project, transforming the old Tiger Bay docklands from the 1990s onward, produced the Wales Millennium Centre (2004), a remarkable building clad in bronze steel and slate with poetry carved into its facade, housing the Welsh National Opera.

The Senedd, the Welsh Parliament building designed by Richard Rogers, sits alongside it on the waterfront. Meanwhile, the Victorian and Edwardian covered arcades in the city center, particularly the Royal Arcade (1858), Morgan Arcade, and the Castle Arcade, form a network of glass-roofed shopping streets that are among the finest in Britain and give the central city a layered, intimate quality at odds with its capital status. The Principality Stadium, where rugby internationals are played in an intensity that has no real equivalent in English sport, sits in the center of the city and can hold 74,500 people.