SalcombeHoliday Accommodation

Salcombe, South Devon

Salcombe Holiday Homes

Whole houses and cottages across the town — your own front door, a kitchen, and room for a family or a group.

All holiday homes we list in Salcombe

133 properties, with the street or area each one sits on. Prices and availability are shown on Booking.com when you open a property.

Holiday Homes in Salcombe

Holiday homes are what Salcombe mostly is. The town has never been a resort of large hotels; it is a hillside of houses above a harbour, and a great many of them are let by the week to visitors. That shapes a stay here more than anything else on this page: you are booking a building rather than a room, so bedrooms, sleeping capacity and where the front door sits matter more than star ratings.

Position is the thing to read carefully. Salcombe is built up a slope, so a property described as being a few minutes from Fore Street may be a few minutes down and rather longer back. Properties towards North Sands and South Sands trade the walk into town for a walk to the sand; the streets above the centre trade the climb for the view. Neither is better — but the listing photographs and the map pin are worth a proper look before you commit.

Parking is the other practical question, and one worth answering before you book rather than on arrival in August. The lanes are narrow, the town's public spaces fill early in season, and an allocated space is a genuine feature rather than a detail. Where a property has one, its listing will say so.

Space for a group

Whole-property lets are how this market works, so larger houses are far easier to find here than a block of adjoining hotel rooms would be. Check the sleeping arrangement rather than the headline number — the same capacity can be four doubles or two doubles and a bunk room.

A kitchen and a week

Self-catering on this coast is usually let Saturday to Saturday in the high season, which means the calendar moves in whole weeks. It also means a shellfish counter and a good kitchen are more use to you here than a hotel restaurant.

Where the door opens

The town is steep and the estuary is tidal. A property's height above the water, its distance from Fore Street and whether it has parking are the three things that most change a stay, and all three are visible in the listing.

Features & Amenities

Whole property to yourselves, with your own entrance
Kitchen, so you can cook what comes off the boats
Bedrooms and sleeping capacity stated on each listing
Many within walking distance of Fore Street and the ferry steps
Parking where the property has it — always stated, never assumed
Weekly lets are the norm in high season

More about Salcombe

Salcombe sits at the mouth of the Kingsbridge Estuary, which is not really a river estuary at all but a ria — a valley drowned by rising sea level. That is why it runs so far inland, and why the water in it is salt the whole way up to Kingsbridge. The result is a naturally sheltered harbour, and the town has spent most of its history making use of it: first as a port, then as a shipbuilding town, and now as one of the busiest sailing centres on the south coast. The harbour has its own class of dinghy, the Salcombe Yawl, designed and built here.

The town is built up a hillside, so almost everything has a view and almost nothing is flat. Fore Street runs along the waterfront with the beaches and the ferry steps below it; the streets above climb steeply enough that a property’s height above the water is worth checking before you book. A small shellfish fleet — around twenty boats, none of them large — still works out of the harbour, which is why the town’s reputation for seafood is a real one rather than a marketing line.

South of the town the shore opens into North Sands and South Sands, and above South Sands the National Trust’s Overbeck’s is terraced into the cliffs at Sharpitor — a subtropical garden of exotic and rare planting, looking out over the mouth of the estuary. Beyond it the land rises to Bolt Head, and the South West Coast Path turns west along some of the most exposed cliff in Devon.

Frequently Asked Questions About Salcombe

Overwhelmingly self-catering. Apartments above the harbour, whole houses on the hillside streets and cottages behind Fore Street make up the great majority of what is available, alongside a small number of hotels and hosted stays. Everything we list in the town is on this page; use the property-type links to narrow it.

It is the natural one for this stretch of coast. The South West Coast Path runs through the town in both directions, the estuary ferries reach beaches you cannot easily drive to, and Kingsbridge and the villages of the South Hams are a short drive inland. It is the end of a peninsula, though — anything on the eastern shore means a ferry or a long way round by road.

Within the town, yes. It is small, and parking in the centre is genuinely difficult in season, so many visitors are better off leaving the car where they are staying. A ferry crosses to East Portlemouth and another runs down to South Sands. For the wider area you will want a car or the bus — check current timetables rather than assuming a connection.

North Sands and South Sands lie on the town side of the estuary, south of the centre. On the East Portlemouth shore opposite is a run of sandy beaches — Sunny Cove nearest the bar, then the larger Mill Bay, Cable Cove, Small’s Cove and Fisherman’s Cove — reached by the passenger ferry. The South Sands ferry lands passengers by sea tractor when the tide is out.

The school summer holidays, and regatta week — Salcombe Yacht Club runs its regatta every August and it draws several hundred dinghies. Accommodation books up a long way ahead for both, and the roads in and out are single-carriageway, so arrival times matter more here than in most places. Late spring and September are quieter, and the coast path is at its best.