Leona Lewis, Fonty Bird

As someone who spent almost 20 years of my life caravanning with the family at Fontygary Bay caravan site and who still has lifelong friends and endless experiences from it, I had to smile reading this in today's Echo.

SHE’S a global singing sensation who jets around the world staying in some of the most exclusive hotels on the planet.

But some of Leona Lewis’ favourite holiday memories are of summers spent at Barry Island and Fontygary, the megastar has revealed.

Leona’s mum Maria is from Penarth and brought the fledgling singing star to visit relatives in Wales during summer holidays.

The former X Factor winner, who has sold more than six million albums worldwide, says she loved Barry Island and the funfair in particular. I’ve been on the log flume and the pirate ship but my favourite was Quasar,” she told the Echo.

“All my mum’s relatives are from Wales and we’d go to Barry Island every weekend when we visited.”

Leona, 24, who was born in London to father Joe from Guyana and her Welsh mother, and brought up in Hackney, also explained her fondness for another unlikely destination for a global superstar – Fontygary Park in Barry.

“We’d stay at Fontygary and I used to love to go horse riding down there in the countryside,” she said. "I always lived in London but never saw myself as a city girl. I used to love that because it was somewhere free, not small confined spaces.”

While those wonder years have left her with a golden glow about Wales, speaking the language has not had such a profound effect.

“Well I can say ‘bore da’ and sing happy birthday in Welsh,” she said.

Ah but has she been banned from the Fontygary Inn, sneaked free golf and tennis games, smashed a shop window playing football ... I doubt it!