Swansea is Wales's second city, a centre of nationalist sympathies, and conducted a bitter but unsuccessful battle with Cardiff to be home to the National Assembly for Wales. Swansea grew to its present importance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becoming a centre of heavy industry, but did not enjoy the same degree of immigration as Cardiff and the eastern valleys. Consequently, it retains close links with agriculture and rural life, and a healthy proportion of the population are Welsh speakers. At the 1991 census, the population of Swansea was about 177,000.
Swansea is a seaside town, in a region popular with holidaymakers from all over Britain. It is also an industrial and commercial centre, with a Roman Catholic cathedral and the ruins of a castle, and is home to a college of the University of Wales. The poet Dylan Thomas spent his first 20 years in the town, at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive. A memorial to him is nearby in Cwmdonkin Park. The actress Catherine Zeta-Jones is probably the most famous of the city's recent cultural exports.
There are a few towns called Swansea in the United States of America: see
Three more ghost towns with the same name are listed on GNIS:
Swansea, Ontario was a village which in 1967 was annexed by Toronto. Its boundaries were the Humber River to the west, High Park to the east, Bloor Street to the north, and to the south the CN railway tracks near the shore of Lake Ontario. Its roots date back to the seventeenth century, when Jean Baptiste Rousseau established a trading post in the area in 1670. The origins of the name are unclear, although the neighbourhood is also known as the Bloor West Village today.
Swansea, Tasmania, Australia is a town located in the center or Tasmania's east coast, on the northwest shore of Great Oyster Bay and overlooking Freycinet National Park. According to the 1996 census, the town's population was 495. 25.1% of the town's population were above the age of 65 - making it the Tasmanian town with the largest percentage of over-65-year-olds.