Trago Mills (often known simply as Trago) is a chain of four department stores in south Cornwall, south Devon in England, and south Wales. It owns a site with an amusement park and some independent businesses, adjoining the store near Newton Abbot.

Three are in town outskirts: Liskeard in Cornwall; Newton Abbot in Devon, and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. Another is in Falmouth, Cornwall. The company emphasises cheapness and variety of stock.

The chain was established by businessman Mike Robertson who bought the Liskeard site in the early 1960s after leaving a career in the RAF.^{[citation needed]}

The company's buildings at Liskeard and Newton Abbot were designed by Charles Hunt of St Neot, Liskeard, whom they appointed in 1978. The buildings have a castle-inspired profile, with white towers and black-framed windows.

Trago also experimented with smaller stores, such as a 'Trago Mini Mart'^{[citation needed]} .

Statues of local political figures and officials the owner believed were opposed to his development "welcome" shoppers to the Liskeard store. One source of opposition may have been that planning permission did not always precede building work^{[citation needed]}

Robertson's local newspaper advertisements resulted in three newspapers carrying the adverts being successfully sued for libel by Sir Edward Heath,^[8] when some of his comments became highly personalised.

Robertson placed advertisements in the 1980s and 1990s calling for the castration of gay men. The United Kingdom Advertising Standards Authority ruled against Trago Mills and demanded the withdrawal of all advertisements in 1998.^[9][10] Trago still occasionally runs inflammatory copy within their ads, one entitled "For any cash strapped Moslems reading this…" appeared in the Falmouth Packet in 2009 to promote a book by senior UKIP official David Challice.^[11]

With his son and successor, Bruce, Robertson supported Eurosceptic political parties, most recently the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Robertson threatened to refuse to stop using imperial measures in his stores, attributing UK metrication to the European Union (Trago today sells goods in metric quantities, sometimes with imperial equivalents, in line with the law).^[12] He remains opposed to speculative immigration from Eastern Europeans. Robertson supports job-specific immigration, more liberally than some in UKIP.^[13][14] In January 2007, the Mid Devon Star suggested this was hypocritical, as his large Newton Abbot site employed around 30 Polish people.^[15]

In September 2011, the company was fined £199,588 after admitting five breaches of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. This followed the discovery of several thousand tonnes of dumped waste, including asbestos, at its Newton Abbot and Liskeard sites.^[16] The fine was reduced to £65,000 in January 2012, after an Exeter Crown Court judge accepted that Trago Mills had paid nearly £500,000 in clean-up costs.^[17]

In 2014, Trago Mills was featured on BBC's Fake Britain, after local Trading Standards discovered fake top-brand shampoo on sale in store. Trago management said that the product had been purchased from a reliable source and they had worked closely with local trading standards to ensure that the product was taken off sale once it had been identified as a fake.

In June 2018, following the opening of the company's store in Merthyr Tydfil, some locals threatened to boycott the shop after Robertson criticised bilingual education and described bilingual English and Welsh signage as "visual clutter".^[18]

In the early 1980s, Trago Mills elected to design and build its own aircraft that could be sold to the British military as a trainer to replace the then ageing "Bulldog" fleet. The result was the Trago Mills SAH-1, which first flew on 23 August 1983. Passed over by the armed forces, the rights to the design have since changed hands several times, the latest version being the FLS Sprint.