Gibsons - Portmeirion 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

An Italianate village on the coast of North Wales, which sounds like a mistake and is entirely real. Portmeirion, painted by Bryan Evans, and the joke of the place is exactly what makes it a good puzzle.

What you are looking at

Buildings in pink, ochre, turquoise, cream and terracotta stacked up a wooded hillside, with a green-domed campanile on the left, a white rotunda with a grey dome in the centre, a bell tower on the right, and a classical colonnade running along the left edge. Balustrades, urns, statues, a gilded figure on a column, and palms and Mediterranean planting throughout, against very English deciduous woodland and a very Welsh sky full of piled cumulus.

In the middle, a formal terrace with white cafe tables and chairs and a small pool. Across the lawn in the foreground, visitors: a group of three women with shopping bags, a man with a backpack and a beagle on a lead, a couple embracing, a person on a mobility scooter, a family with a pushchair, and in the bottom left corner, an artist at an easel painting the scene you are building. Seagulls throughout.

What it is like to build

The colour coding does the sorting. Every building is a different pastel, and there is no other picture in the range where that is so cleanly true. Pull piles by colour and each pile is one building.

Build the domes and the towers first, since they are the strongest silhouettes against sky. Then the colonnade on the left, which is a hard repeating rhythm of columns. Then the figures, each a small block of one clothing colour on green grass. The two hard regions are the woodland and the sky: massed summer green with no structure, and big soft cumulus. Both go in by tone at the end.

Why the Gibsons build matters

Gibsons have been British since 1919 and make their 1000 piece puzzles in the UK and Europe on 100% recycled board, thick enough that pieces do not curl. The box carries their People & Planet mark and is plastic-free and tab-sealed rather than shrink wrapped.

Specifications

A little context

Portmeirion was built over fifty years by one architect who wanted to prove you could develop a beautiful site without ruining it. As a puzzle subject it is unusually generous, because a village designed as a series of deliberate views is already composed, which is more than can be said for most places. Derived from multiple public data sources across retail, search and community platforms, refreshed 31 August 2026.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.