Anyone who visits Blaenafon soon realizes that this small town at the head of the Eastern Valley of South Wales is a special place. Now it's official, with a UNESCO award of World Heritage Site - and suddenly everyone wants to find out what it is about Blaenavon that is so unique.

What actually makes Blaenafon so different from other sites is that the iron industry, so important to Blaenavon's rise to fame and fortune, deserted the town so quickly and completely when things started to go wrong. If it had been a slow decline as it was elsewhere, buildings would have been converted to other use, the Blaenafon workforce would have learnt new skills and the community would have changed. As it was, this first great wealth provider collapsed rapidly with the advent of cheap steel production - a cruel twist of fate as the discovery that enabled this was actually made here at Forgeside, Blaenavon. Then later when the seams dwindled, the coal industry also abandoned the town with nothing much to take its place. Consequently, a great deal of infrastructure fell into disuse and lay decaying until the true value of Blaenafon's industrial heritage was realized.

So Blaenavon, once the superlative mining town of Britain, if not Europe - possibly the closest comparison to the 'boom and bust' frontier mining towns of the New World - rises again as a tourist attraction to rival Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall, to say nothing of the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China.

Fascinating, isn't it!

View the pages on this site to learn more about how Blaenafon is set for pre-eminence once again in one of the major industries of the 21st century - tourism!