Wrexham spent a long time being a place people drove through. The road is still there. The reasons to stop have multiplied considerably.
Within a walk
Start with the thing you can see from most of the town. St Giles' Parish Church has a tower that has been called one of the Seven Wonders of Wales for longer than anyone can properly justify, and it earns it. Go and stand underneath it rather than photographing it from the street. In the churchyard is the grave of Elihu Yale, a merchant whose donation to a small American college resulted in the college taking his name. Yale University's own tower is a deliberate nod to this one, which is a strange thing to find at the end of a Welsh market town.
Five minutes away, Ty Pawb is the town's odd and rather good experiment in putting galleries and a market in the same building. Exhibitions change, the food stalls are worth the trip on their own, and it is the single best place to work out what kind of town this actually is.
Then there is the Racecourse Ground, or Stok Cae Ras, which is not just where the football happens but the oldest international football stadium in the world still hosting international fixtures. Wales played here before most countries had a national team. Even if you are not at a match, the Turf next door will let you look at it over a pint.
And if you want the town's other free gallery, the murals are their own walk, which we have written up separately.
Left: the Turf, and behind it the oldest international ground on earth. Right: St Giles', which has outlasted everything around it.
Within twenty minutes
This is where Wrexham starts giving more than a town its size should.
Erddig
A National Trust country house just south of town, and an unusual one. The family who lived here documented their servants with such obsessive affection that the below-stairs half is the more interesting tour. Portraits and verses about the gardeners and the carpenters, hung by the people they worked for. Go for the downstairs, stay for the gardens.
Chirk Castle
A working fortress from the reign of Edward I that somebody then lived in continuously for seven hundred years, which is why it has both murder holes and drawing rooms. The wrought-iron gates alone are worth the drive.
The Clywedog Valley
A river trail through what was once the industrial engine of the area: Bersham Ironworks, Nant Mill, and a lot of very quiet woodland that used to be extremely loud. Walkable in sections; you do not have to do the whole thing.
Llangollen
Twenty minutes and a different world: a river town with a steam railway, a canal, and hills immediately behind it. The obvious half-day out, and the one most visitors wish they had allowed longer for.
The aqueduct
Pontcysyllte deserves its own section because photographs consistently fail it. It is a canal, in an iron trough, on stone piers, one hundred and twenty-six feet above the River Dee, built by Thomas Telford and William Jessop and finished in 1805, at a point in history when this was an almost unhinged thing to attempt. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it is fifteen minutes from your hotel.
You can walk across it. There is a towpath on one side with a railing, and on the other side there is nothing at all between the water and the drop, which is the detail everyone remembers. Boats still go over. People still stand at the edge and change their minds.
If you do one thing here that is not football, do this.
Pontcysyllte. A canal, in the sky, since 1805.
Making a day of it
If you have one full day and a car, this is the route that wastes the least of it: north to south, finishing near enough to town to get a table for dinner.
Without a car it is still doable, but pick two rather than four. Chirk and Llangollen are the easier pair to reach on public transport; Erddig is the one that rewards a taxi.
If it rains
It will. Wrexham Museum is small, free and better than that combination suggests, and it is the fastest way to understand why the town looks the way it does. Ty Pawb works as a rainy afternoon on its own. The Wrexham Lager brewery tour is indoors by definition and covered in our drinking guide.
And there is always the option the locals take, which is to accept the weather, go to the pub at four, and let the afternoon become an evening. Nobody here will think less of you.
One for the town, one for the valley. Rooms from every price bracket.