Visit Llandudno because it combines a proper seaside town with serious landscape. Many resorts have a promenade and beach. Far fewer have a great limestone headland rising directly behind them like a family secret.

The Great Orme rises to 207 metres behind the town. Beneath it lie the largest known prehistoric copper mines in the world, worked from 1700 BC. The headland is a National Nature Reserve, a SSSI and a Country Park simultaneously. A Kashmiri goat herd of two hundred animals grazes freely. These facts are worth knowing before you decide whether a coastal resort in North Wales warrants your time.

The Great Orme gives Llandudno scale. The promenade (a mile and a half of level seafront) gives it manners. The pier (700 metres, opened 1877, Grade II* listed) gives it theatre. West Shore gives it air. Together, they produce a town with more substance than the average coastal confection.

Llandudno is also practical. You can walk, eat, shop, see a show at Venue Cymru, visit the pier, ride the tramway, explore the mines and still use the town as a base for Conwy (20 minutes), Eryri (50 minutes), Anglesey (45 minutes) and the wider coast.

It is scenic without being remote, historic without being frozen and polished enough to welcome visitors while still feeling like a real North Wales town.

There are faded edges and tired corners. Good. A place without flaws is either new, expensive or lying.

The reason to visit is balance. Llandudno has enough beauty to seduce, enough practicality to function and enough imperfection to remain interesting after the first photograph.

The Victorian Extravaganza in May, the theatre programme at Venue Cymru year-round, the Great Orme walks in any season and the West Shore sunset available on any clear evening give the town purpose beyond July and August.

Llandudno was planned as a resort and it succeeds as one, not by hiding its age but by inhabiting it. The tramway opened in 1902 and still runs. The mines below the headland are three and a half thousand years old and still open. The promenade is Victorian and still used. These continuities are the real reason to visit.

Come for the Orme, the promenade, the pier, the history and the light at the right time of evening. Come prepared for weather, curious about the past and willing to walk. Return, as most visitors do, having left something unfinished.