Wales: A country of castles, dragons, natural beauty…and a summit

In early September, the UK will host the next NATO Summit at Newport. The Summit will be an important event in itself, but it’s also an opportunity for us to promote one of the less known countries of the United Kingdom: Wales!

Most of the Anglophone Greeks I know are in love with London. More adventurous Greeks may travel north to York, the centre of my home county Yorkshire, and fall in love with the city’s incomparable mediaeval and Georgian beauty (many of you may have seen the wonderful pictures of the Grand Départ in Yorkshire of this year’s Tour de France; see http://letour.yorkshire.com). Increasingly large numbers of Greeks head even further north and experience Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Another city, another love-affair.

But alas!, very few of my Greeks friends and colleagues know Wales. My press officer studied at Cardiff and I have met Greek journalists who studied at the Cardiff journalism school. These Greeks all share a little known and a very precious secret. They know that Wales is one of the indisputable jewels of Great Britain. I have 200 words left to persuade you, my readers, that you too should get to know Wales (if you don’t already).

I fell in love with Wales when I was a young boy and was taken across the Severn Bridge that joins England and Wales to see the great castle at Chepstow. Wales is a country of great castles and I was a boy who loved all things mediaeval, even these statements of rude power. In my adult years, I have grown to love even more of Wales.

It is a country of incomparable natural and cultural beauty. A dozen years ago, after attending a wedding near Ruthin in north Wales, I sought out the isolated Cistercian monastery of Valle Crucis, a perfect ruin in a vale beneath the mountains of Llangollen. And the following year, I went to St David’s, the capital of Wales’s great patron Saint, whose ancient cathedral climbs painfully but with great spiritual dignity up the hill on which the mediaeval labourers built it. By this point, I was hooked on Wales’s beauty, and started to immerse myself in its landscapes. From a trip with a great friend into the mountainous area of Snowdonia, I swear I can still smell the freshness in the air as we cycled down off the high mountains alongside crystalline brooks towards Lake Bala. I have walked the Pembrokeshire coastline between Tenby and Pembroke, enjoying the majestic beauty and natural power of this dramatic junction between land and sea. (I’m attaching a photo, to show not so much the walker as the walked.) The beauty of Wales is justly praised by the country’s many great poets and bards.

Wales is a proud nation of three million people, with more than 30,000 years of history, a territory of over 8000 square miles and an economy worth more than £47 billion. Heads of Government, foreign ministers and defence ministers from over 60 countries will gather on 4-5 September at Celtic Manor, Newport. They are lucky people – especially if they take some time out to get to see and know Wales. At the Conference itself, we have three headline goals. We want to demonstrate that NATO is:

• Strong, united and ready to meet and defeat any threat;
• Modernising and investing to stay ahead of our adversaries;
• Building the broadest global security network the world has ever seen.

In the weeks before the Summit, we shall be revealing more detail about what we aim to achieve (see @NATOWales and NATO Summit Wales 2014). And we shall be doing everything we can to promote the culture, language and people of Wales. Watch our press pages and social media accounts for more information. The Welsh dragon is ready to welcome the world.