Salcombe, South Devon
Salcombe Hotels
The small number of hotel stays in and around the town, for a trip where you would rather not self-cater.
All hotels we list in Salcombe
4 properties, with the street or area each one sits on. Prices and availability are shown on Booking.com when you open a property.
- Harbour Beach Club, Hotel & Spa — South Sands
- South Sands Hotel — Bolt Head
- Gara Rock — Gara Rock
- Harbour Hotel & Spa Salcombe — Cliff Road
Hotels in Salcombe
Salcombe has few hotels, and that is a fact about the town rather than a gap in what we list. The market here is overwhelmingly self-catering — whole houses and apartments let by the week — so the hotels that do exist are a small and distinctive group rather than a row of them along a promenade.
They are the right choice for a short stay, for a trip where cooking is not the plan, and for anyone who would rather arrive to a desk and a restaurant than to a key safe. Because there are so few, they are also the category to book earliest: in a town where most of the accommodation moves in whole weeks, the rooms that can be taken for two or three nights are in demand out of proportion to their number.
Note that our listings show a room rather than a building, so the bedroom and sleeping figures shown against a self-catering property elsewhere on this site are deliberately not shown here — they would describe the room you searched for, not the hotel.
Few, so book early
This is a self-catering town. The hotels are a small group and they take the demand for short stays from a whole market that otherwise lets by the week.
Good for a short stay
If you want two or three nights rather than a full week, a hotel is usually the easier booking here — most whole-property lets run Saturday to Saturday in season.
Arriving without a plan
A desk, a restaurant and someone who knows the tide times is worth something in a town where parking is difficult and the ferries are seasonal.
Features & Amenities
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.