Dublin

💡 About Dublin

Dublin, Ireland's compact and sociable capital on the south bank of the River Liffey, has the highest ratio of Nobel Prize-winning writers to population of any city in the world: George Bernard Shaw (1925), William Butler Yeats (1923), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995) were all born, educated or deeply formed in Dublin — a concentration of literary genius per square kilometre that is simply unmatched anywhere on Earth. The city's literary tradition extends far beyond its Nobel laureates: James Joyce set virtually his entire body of work in Dublin — Ulysses, his stream-of-consciousness masterpiece that recreates a single day (16 June 1904, now celebrated annually as Bloomsday) in the streets of the city with a precision so detailed that scholars have verified every address, every pub and every tram route described — and Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan all emerged from this small city on the edge of the Atlantic. Dublin's pub culture is the most developed and socially meaningful in the English-speaking world: the city's 1,000-plus pubs are not primarily venues for drinking but for conversation, music, storytelling, political argument and the deeply Irish art of the craic — a word that encompasses the electric combination of good company, wit, music and spontaneous connection that makes a great Dublin pub session an experience unlike anything else in the world.

The Guinness Storehouse at St. James's Gate, where Arthur Guinness signed his famous 9,000-year lease at £45 per annum in 1759 (a lease that, if it runs its full term, will not expire until 10,759 AD), is consistently Ireland's most visited tourist attraction, taking visitors through seven floors that trace the history of the world's most famous stout before rewarding them with a pint and a 360-degree view of the city from the Gravity Bar on the top floor. Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I on the site of a dissolved Augustinian priory, is Ireland's oldest and most prestigious university; its Long Room library — 65 metres of oak barrel-vaulted ceiling, 200,000 of the library's oldest volumes and two marble busts of luminaries along its entire length — is one of the most beautiful library interiors in the world and houses the Book of Kells, four volumes of the four Gospels written and illuminated by Celtic monks around 800 AD in a display of penmanship and artistry so extraordinary that the pages are turned once per day to prevent visitors from camping at a single opening.

Kilmainham Gaol, the grim prison on the western edge of the city where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed by firing squad in the tiny stonebreakers' yard — fourteen men shot over ten days, transforming a rebellion that had been dismissed by much of the Irish population into the founding martyrology of the Irish state — is the most important site of Irish political memory in existence, and the tour through its cells and courtyards remains one of the most emotionally affecting museum experiences in Europe. Georgian Dublin — the elegant red-brick townhouses with their identical proportions and their famously colourful front doors (each owner traditionally choosing a different colour to distinguish their house from their neighbours') that line the streets of Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square and the streets around St Stephen's Green — was built during the 18th century when Dublin was the second city of the British Empire, a period of cultural and architectural flourishing that left the city with a legacy of neoclassical elegance. The River Liffey, which divides Dublin north and south (a division that still carries social and economic significance in the Irish capital), is crossed by seventeen bridges, the most beloved of which is the Ha'penny Bridge, a graceful cast-iron footbridge built in 1816 whose official name is the Liffey Bridge but whose popular name derives from the halfpenny toll once charged to cross it.

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