Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath in Irish — "Town of the Hurdled Ford") is the capital and largest city of Ireland (population 1.4 million in the greater Dublin area, 60% of the Republic of Ireland's total population concentrated in one metropolitan area). Dublin is a city of extraordinary literary density: it is the setting of James Joyce's Ulysses (the single most important novel of the 20th century, set entirely in Dublin on June 16, 1904 — now celebrated as Bloomsday, when thousands of Dubliners and literary pilgrims recreate Leopold Bloom's walk through the city in Edwardian dress), the birthplace of Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw (four Nobel Prize winners in literature from one small city), and Jonathan Swift (who wrote Gulliver's Travels while Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral). Dublin is also the city that produced Guinness stout (brewed at the St. James's Gate Brewery since 1759, the original lease signed for 9,000 years by Arthur Guinness), the Book of Kells (the most famous illuminated manuscript in the world, created by Irish monks in 800 AD, housed at Trinity College Dublin), and the Temple Bar cultural quarter on the south bank of the Liffey (the most visited pub district in Ireland).
Trinity College Dublin (founded 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I, the oldest university in Ireland and one of the oldest in the English-speaking world): the Book of Kells (the illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels created by Irish monks in approximately 800 AD on the island of Iona and the monastery of Kells — the most elaborately decorated manuscript in the world, with each of its 680 vellum pages containing intricately interwoven patterns of Celtic knotwork, zoomorphic illuminations (animals whose bodies merge into decorative spirals) and the Chi-Rho page (the opening of the Gospel of Matthew) considered the most complex single page of calligraphy and illustration in the history of art). Adjacent: the Long Room (the two-storey barrel-vaulted library containing 200,000 of Trinity's oldest books — one of the most beautiful library interiors in the world).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideGrafton Street (the pedestrianized shopping street of Dublin, always with buskers — the tradition of Dublin street music is so strong that U2's Bono and the Edge famously busked on Grafton Street in their early career) and St Stephen's Green (the 22-acre Victorian park at the south end of Grafton Street — the most central park in Dublin, designed in its current form by Sir Arthur Guinness in 1880 and donated to the city: the park featured in the 1916 Easter Rising when the Irish Citizen Army occupied it and the British Army machine-gunned it from the Shelbourne Hotel).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideDublin Castle (the complex built on the site of the original Norse Dublin, the seat of British rule in Ireland from 1204 to 1922 (the castle was handed over to Michael Collins by the British Viceroy on January 16, 1922 — Collins was famously 7 minutes late, to which the Viceroy said "You are 7 minutes late" and Collins replied "We've been waiting 700 years, you can have the 7 minutes")) and the Chester Beatty Library (in the castle garden: the collection of medieval Islamic manuscripts, Japanese woodblock prints, Chinese jade books and ancient Egyptian papyri assembled by the American mining magnate Sir Alfred Chester Beatty — voted the best museum in Europe multiple times).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Cobblestone (77 King Street North, Smithfield — the most celebrated traditional Irish music pub in Dublin: the trad session (the informal gathering of musicians who play together without payment, purely for the tradition of the music) happens in the snug every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 9:30pm. The musicians play reels, jigs, polkas and slow airs on fiddle, uilleann pipes (the bellows-blown Irish bagpipe — the most complex and quiet bagpipe in the world, held between the elbow (uillean) and the body), tin whistle, bodhrán (the shallow frame drum) and button accordion. Sit close to the musicians, order a pint of Guinness (pulled correctly in Dublin: 2 minutes to fill 3/4, 2-minute settle, top off to a perfect dome) and listen.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideKilmainham Gaol (the disused Victorian prison (1796–1924) where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed: Robert Emmet (1803), the Young Irelanders (1848) and the 1916 Rising leaders including Patrick Pearse, James Connolly (too injured to stand, executed seated in a chair), and 13 others in the stone-breakers' yard. The gaol is the most viscerally moving historical site in Ireland: the guided tour (the only way to visit) walks through the East Wing (the panopticon wing, 1862 — the spoked radial design where a single guard at the center can see every cell), the execution yard, and the room where the last prisoner released was Éamon de Valera (who became President of Ireland). Book the guided tour 2 weeks in advance.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideGuinness Storehouse (St. James's Gate Brewery — the visitor center in a converted 1904 fermentation storehouse (the building is shaped like a pint glass when viewed from above): the seven floors trace the history of Guinness from Arthur Guinness's original 1759 lease (signed for 9,000 years at £45/year — the document is displayed on the ground floor) through the brewing process (the four ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast — Guinness uses the distinctive Liffey water filtered through the volcanic basalt of the Dublin Mountains), and the Gravity Bar at the top (the circular glass-walled bar with a 360° panoramic view of Dublin) where the tour culminates in a free pint of Guinness poured to the exact two-stage Dublin standard.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideMerrion Square (the finest Georgian square in Dublin, 1762–1793: the terraced townhouses with their painted doors (the most photographed feature of Dublin — the painted Georgian doors of Dublin in red, yellow, green, blue and black with the distinctive brass knockers and fanlights (the semi-circular window above the door that lets light into the entrance hall)) surround the park where Oscar Wilde's reclining statue (Dermot Power, 1997 — the witty, flamboyant bronze of Wilde lounging on a rock with a quote carved beneath: "I can resist everything except temptation") faces the house at 1 Merrion Square where he was born. W.B. Yeats also lived on the square.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Winding Stair Restaurant (40 Lower Ormond Quay — the restaurant above the bookshop on the north bank of the Liffey with views across the Ha'penny Bridge: the finest traditional Irish cooking in Dublin, focused on Irish farm produce, west coast seafood and the classic Irish dishes (the Irish stew (the original using lamb neck, onion, potato and water — no tomato, no carrot, no herbs in the authentic Connacht version), the Wicklow lamb, the Burren smoked salmon) in a relaxed, unpretentious, literary setting (the restaurant takes its name from the famous W.B. Yeats poem "The Winding Stair")).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideNational Museum of Ireland — Archaeology (Kildare Street: the most important collection of prehistoric and early medieval Irish art in the world: the Tara Brooch (700 AD — the finest example of Insular metalwork: a penannular (open-ring) brooch of gold filigree, amber and glass enamel, with zoomorphic patterns of the same complexity as the Book of Kells worked at microscopic scale in gold wire), the Ardagh Chalice (800 AD — the two-handled silver chalice used for the Eucharist, considered the greatest piece of early medieval metalwork in the world), the Viking Dublin exhibition (the 40 original 9th-century Norse longships and the complete excavation finds from Wood Quay — the site of the original Viking Dublin, discovered during the construction of Dublin Civic Offices in 1969) and the bog bodies.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Ha'penny Bridge (the Wellington Bridge — the cast iron pedestrian bridge over the River Liffey built in 1816, so named because a half-penny toll was charged to cross it (the toll was removed in 1919): the most photographed bridge in Ireland, painted white with its distinctive curved railings and three-lantern lamp posts. The Liffey boardwalk on the north bank (Millennium Walkway, 2000) connects the Ha'penny Bridge west to the Four Courts (the neoclassical law courts with the copper-green dome, 1802, shelled in the 1922 Irish Civil War when the anti-Treaty IRA forces retreating from the building destroyed the Public Record Office inside — the loss of 1,000 years of Irish historical records is one of the greatest archival disasters in European history).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideDún Laoghaire (pronounced "Dun Leery" — the harbor town 12km south of Dublin, 20 min on the DART coastal rail (Dublin Area Rapid Transit): the two Victorian granite piers (the East Pier and West Pier, built 1817–1859 to create a harbor of refuge in Dublin Bay — each pier is 1.3km long, making a combined promenade of 2.6km of Victorian masonry into the sea). The People's Park in Dún Laoghaire (the Victorian pleasure garden) and the James Joyce Tower (Sandycove, 10 min walk from Dún Laoghaire — the Martello tower where Joyce lived briefly in 1904 and set the opening chapter of Ulysses: now a James Joyce Museum with first editions, his guitar, and his waistcoat).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Long Hall (51 South Great George's Street — one of the oldest and finest-preserved Victorian pub interiors in Dublin: the mahogany bar (the longest mahogany bar in Dublin), the gilded mirrors, the Victorian clocks (collected over centuries, ticking at their own rates on the walls) and the snug (the small private booth of the Victorian Irish pub — the space where women and the clergy drank discretely in the era when the main bar was exclusively male). The Long Hall has been in continuous operation since at least 1766 and the interior has barely changed since the Victorian renovation of 1880.
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