The volunteers behind Tenby‘s Summer Spectacular have formally confirmed that this year’s events are cancelled, after failing to resolve a dispute with the council over crowd safety.
Tenby Round Table said the two events, due to be held on 16 and 30 August, could not safely go ahead without a clear, lawful way to control pedestrian access to the harbour event area.
In a statement, the volunteers said it was “with huge sadness and heartfelt regret” that they were calling off the 2026 events.
The decision brings to a head a dispute that first spilled into the open last week, when the group said it had been left waiting months for an answer from Pembrokeshire County Council.
At the heart of it is a single question the Round Table says it has been asking since late May: which legal power the council would use to let organisers temporarily restrict pedestrian access through the licensed event area.
The group said this was not red tape but “the foundation of safe crowd management” for an increasingly popular event in Tenby Harbour — something it said both organisers and the emergency services wanted.
It said it had received three written responses from the council, none of which, in its view, answered the question with a clear legal basis.
The Round Table said the first two responses dealt with road traffic powers, while a third, received on 25 June, looked instead at historic harbour documents and concluded the council had no power to restrict access to the beach.
The volunteers stressed they were “not lawyers” but said they had asked the council to point to the specific law preventing it, and had not been given one.
The group said the council had instead suggested two alternatives, neither of which it considered workable.
One would see the volunteers manage public access to the beach themselves within an agreed capacity figure, which the group said it had not been given.
The other would involve redrawing the event boundary, which the Round Table said would require substantial fencing that could block emergency vehicle access and create its own safety risk.
The volunteers also pointed to last year’s Ironman Wales event, when they said the council used a road traffic power to close a pedestrian route to a Tenby beach.
The group said it was not criticising that decision, but had not been told why the same approach could not be considered for the Summer Spectacular.
The Round Table said the previous open-access arrangement had rightly been flagged as unsatisfactory by the emergency services, because of the risk of overcrowding in the harbour — one of the reasons its licence had been called in for review for the first time in 14 years.
The harbour and its beaches draw huge numbers of visitors to the town each summer, with extra measures already brought in this year to manage the seasonal crowds.
When the dispute first emerged, Pembrokeshire County Council said it had never asked for the event to be cancelled, and that it remained willing to work with organisers.
The Round Table said the council had, on being told of the cancellation, offered to help plan a “robust event management plan” for 2027.
The group said it was not walking away, and would keep working through the licensing process — adding that it was also exploring whether the Welsh Government could use its own powers to help.
The volunteers said the events had raised money for local charities and brought the community together for the best part of 40 years.
“We will return,” the statement said.
