Terraced stone streets run right up to the castle walls here, and the town centre still feels like a working Welsh market town rather than a heritage set-piece — bakeries and bookies alongside gift shops, Welsh spoken as often as English on the street. It attracts a mix you don't see everywhere: a fairly settled, slightly younger-than-average population, families who've been here generations, and a steady trickle of people drawn by the castle, the water, and the price of a house. Housing here is overwhelmingly terraced and freehold — of the sales sampled, terraces outnumber everything else combined, and freehold ownership is the default rather than the exception. A For Sale board on one of these streets is usually advertising a stone terrace under £200,000, some way below both the Welsh average and the price across Gwynedd as a whole; detached houses buck the trend and actually sell for more here than the Wales-wide figure, which tells you the detached stock that exists is a cut above, even if there's not much of it. Schooling is entirely Welsh-medium or bilingual community provision — Ysgol Syr Hugh Owen handles secondary-age pupils in real numbers, and there's a run of primaries (Ysgol Yr Hendre, Ysgol Y Gelli, Maesincla) serving different pockets of the town, plus Ysgol Pendalar for special education. There's no direct rail link in the picture, but with 93 bus stops packed into a small footprint, this is a town built around walking and buses rather than driving or trains. Green space is genuinely generous for the size of the place — 37 separate spaces adding up to just over 20 hectares, which for a town this compact means you're never far from somewhere open. Health provision scores about as well as anywhere in Wales, and the grades for environment and nightlife both sit well above the Welsh average, which matches what you'd expect from a town that pulls in visitors for the castle and the water and keeps enough pubs and eateries going to serve them year-round. Weekends here have a rhythm built around the waterfront, the castle walls, and a decent choice of places to eat for a town of under 6,000 people. The one figure that doesn't fit the pattern is safety. Everything else — schools, health, environment, connectivity — reads comfortably above the Welsh average, but the crime grade sits notably lower, and the numbers explain why: violence and sexual offences and anti-social behaviour together account for well over half of recorded crime, and the overall rate runs far higher than the Gwynedd average. That's the trade-off to sit with rather than the terraced prices or the castle view. Caernarfon suits people who want a proper Welsh-speaking town with culture, coastline and affordable stone housing on the doorstep, and who are prepared to weigh that against a crime picture that lags well behind everything else the town does well.