Our journey to glamping in Wales

We didn’t study Glamping in school.  

As you are probably aware there is no glamping school or degree course on how to build a yurt. When we started the word glamping didn’t even exist. So how did we come to set up a glamping site in Wales?

Our story starts back in the summer of 2007 at the Electric Gardens festival in Mount Ephraim, a beautiful Edwardian gardens in Kent. We love our festivals, especially the smaller ones where you can escape the crowds actually see the bands. Calvin Harris was second on the bill, which is funny because I don’t think we even knew who he was back then. We saw Kate Nash, Supergrass, and the Happy Mondays. As well as our love of music our other passion was food, hardly surprising given our half Spanish (Eric), half Italian (Anya) heritage. While sat in our tent waiting for the first bands to kick off we discussed how great it would be to grow our own veg and have our own pigs. We decided there and then that we had to escape the rat race. We left Kent full of excitement having realised what we really wanted out of life.

Once home we began to formulate business plans, but none of our ideas really excited us. It was disheartening. On top of this we desperately needed a holiday, something that could make use of the tent we’d just bought! It was during this holiday hunt while keying random things into google that I came across a gorgeous yurt campsite in Andalusia, Spain. 

This was the first time I’d discovered yurts, certainly the first time I had ever seen a yurt campsite. Wow, these yurts were amazing! The whole concept was amazing! You could enjoy the benefits of a camping holiday; sleeping under canvas, fresh air, being close to nature without needing to pack half the contents of your house. They had beds, woodburners, rugs, cushions, solar lights. This was all totally fascinating to me. This was it, this was the idea we had been looking for to make our dream a reality. Simple, attractive and just mad enough to work. 

We set about finding the perfect location to create our yurt campsite. It didn’t take us long to decide on Wales. With some of most breathtaking scenery in the UK we knew the hills would make the perfect backdrop to our little oasis. After viewing several smallholdings we knew instantly that Clyniarth was the one. The view as we drove down the drive was breath taking. The lay out of the land and positioning of the house to what would later become the yurt campsite was perfect. By the end of 2007 we had sold up and moved in. By August the following year we welcomed our first guests to Strawberry Skys Yurts. 

It’s true, running a yurt glamping site in Wales isn’t the career path we chose, we didn’t study it at university or even take yurt campsite night classes. But we love our life here in Wales and we absolutely love sharing this beautiful place we call Strawberry Skys with our guests. We wouldn’t have it any other way.