🇮🇪 Ireland · Dublin and the East
Dublin is one of those capitals you cover on foot and experience in its pubs. On the banks of the river Liffey, this Georgian city of coloured doors and cobbled streets combines a thousand years of history with young, vibrant energy: it is the birthplace of some of the greatest writers in the English language — Joyce, Wilde, Beckett, Yeats, Shaw — the home of the pint of Guinness and the place where traditional Irish music plays every night in the bars of Temple Bar.
But Dublin is much more than beer and literature. It is Trinity College with its dream of a library and the Book of Kells; it is the imposing St Patrick's Cathedral and Dublin Castle; it is the overwhelming Kilmainham Gaol, where Irish independence took shape; and it is its national museums, free and world class. A city where the history of the great famines, the risings and the fight for freedom sits alongside the humour, the warmth and the legendary hospitality of its people.
This guide covers the essentials of Dublin with a practical, warm eye: what to see in its historic districts, how to get into its literary and religious gems, where to have the best pint, how to get around and what trips to make nearby. Dublin is compact, walkable and deeply welcoming: the ideal gateway to falling in love with Ireland.
Dublin grew up beside a ford on the river Liffey: its Irish name, Baile Átha Cliath, means 'the town of the hurdled ford', while 'Dublin' comes from Dubh Linn, 'the black pool', a pond where the Vikings moored their ships. Although there were already Celtic settlements and a Christian monastery in the area, it was the arrival of the Vikings in the ninth century that founded the city as such: around the year 841 they established a trading port that became one of the largest markets for slaves and goods in northern Europe. In 1014 the Irish king Brian Boru defeated them at the battle of Clontarf. From 1170, the Anglo-Norman invasion brought Dublin under English control, and the city became the centre of British rule in Ireland for centuries. Its greatest period of splendour came in the eighteenth century, when it became one of the most elegant cities in the British Empire: its great squares and red-brick Georgian houses with coloured doors date from then. The nineteenth century brought the tragedy of the Great Famine (1845-1852), which decimated the population of the whole of Ireland through hunger and emigration. The twentieth century was that of the fight for independence: the Easter Rising of 1916, harshly put down in Dublin, lit the fuse that led to independence for most of the island in 1922. After difficult decades, the 'Celtic Tiger' economic boom at the end of the twentieth century turned Dublin into the prosperous, cosmopolitan capital it is today. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Ireland's historic and political heart: the Dublin founded by the Vikings and capital of the Ascendancy and of the 1916 revolution, the medieval Kilkenny of the Normans and the Pale, and the monastic valley of Glendalough in the Wicklow mountains.
Read the history of Dublin and the East →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Dublin's name comes from dark water. The traditional Irish place name, 'Dubh Linn', literally means 'black pool', and refers to a pool of dark water that formed where the river Poddle flowed into the Liffey, beside the spot where Dublin Castle would later be raised. From that 'Dubh Linn' comes the English 'Dublin'. But the city also has another name, the one Irish speakers use today: 'Baile Átha Cliath', meaning 'the town of the hurdled ford', referring to a crossing of woven reeds that allowed people to cross the Liffey. Both names live on: the dark Viking pool and the Celtic ford.
Before the city there were already Christian monastic settlements in the area, but urban Dublin was born with the Vikings. From the year 841, Norse seafarers (mostly Norwegians) established a 'longphort' — a fortified camp for their ships — on the bank of the Liffey. From that base they raided and traded across Ireland and the Irish Sea, and little by little the camp became a prosperous trading port. Dublin became one of the great Viking markets of the North Atlantic, dealing in slaves, silver, amber and goods from all over Europe.
The Norse-Gaelic kingdom of Dublin had a turbulent life, with Viking kings, expulsions and returns. Its military power was finally broken at the battle of Clontarf, in 1014, when the High King of Ireland Brian Boru defeated a coalition of Dublin Vikings and their allies, although he died in the battle himself. Archaeological excavations in the Wood Quay area brought to light, in the twentieth century, the remains of that Viking and medieval Dublin, confirming the importance of the Norse settlement in the city's origins.
In 1169-1171, Ireland was invaded by the Anglo-Normans, knights who came from England and Wales in the service of King Henry II of England. Dublin fell in 1170 to forces commanded by Richard de Clare, known as 'Strongbow', and in 1171 Henry II himself came to the city and received the submission of several Irish kings. That was the beginning of more than seven centuries of English presence in Ireland, and Dublin became the centre of English Crown power on the island.
The Normans and the English settlers who followed them transformed the city. On top of the old Viking settlement they raised a walled medieval town, with its castle, its churches and its guilds. Dublin Castle, built from 1204 by order of King John, became the seat of English government in Ireland for centuries. The city's two great medieval cathedrals also date from this period: Christ Church Cathedral, older in origin but rebuilt by the Normans, and St Patrick's Cathedral, the largest in Ireland, founded in 1191.
In the late Middle Ages, effective English rule shrank to a strip of territory around Dublin known as 'the Pale', while the rest of Ireland remained under the control of increasingly independent Gaelic and Norman lords. Dublin nevertheless remained the administrative capital and the island's main port, a small but strategic city from which the Crown tried to govern a country that was largely slipping away from it.
The eighteenth century was Dublin's golden age. Under the rule of the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority (the 'Ascendancy'), and with its own Irish Parliament meeting in the city, Dublin went through extraordinary expansion and became one of the great capitals of Europe, at times the second city of the British Empire after London. This was the Georgian era, named after the King Georges who reigned at the time.
Much of the city's elegant face dates from those years: the broad garden squares (such as Merrion Square and St Stephen's Green), the long rows of brick houses with their unmistakable coloured doors crowned by glass fanlights, and the great neoclassical public buildings. The Custom House and the Four Courts, both by the architect James Gandon on the banks of the Liffey, the old Irish Parliament building (today the Bank of Ireland) and the expansion of Trinity College are monuments from this period. A planning body, the Wide Streets Commission, laid out broad, harmonious avenues that still define the centre.
But behind the splendour lay enormous inequality: Georgian prosperity coexisted with wretched slums and with a Catholic majority stripped of rights by the Penal Laws. The period ended politically with a hard blow for the city: the Act of Union of 1800, which dissolved the Irish Parliament and merged Ireland with Great Britain into the United Kingdom. Deprived of its parliament and of the aristocracy that went with it, Dublin lost much of its shine and entered the nineteenth century as a capital in decline.
Dublin was the setting for the event that changed Ireland's destiny: the Easter Rising of 1916. During Easter week in April that year, a group of Irish nationalists and republicans rose against British rule. Led by figures such as Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, the rebels occupied key buildings in the centre and proclaimed the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office (the GPO) on O'Connell Street.
The rebellion was crushed militarily within days, and much of central Dublin was left in ruins after the fighting and the British shelling. Irish public opinion, initially cool towards the insurgents, swung sharply when the leaders of the Rising were summarily executed by the British authorities at Kilmainham Gaol. Those firing squads turned the rebels into martyrs and sent popular support for the independence cause soaring.
What followed was the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and, after it, the Anglo-Irish Treaty that in 1922 gave birth to the Irish Free State, with Dublin as its capital. The city was also the setting for the painful Civil War that broke out next between supporters and opponents of the Treaty, in which the Four Courts building, for instance, went up in flames. Independent Ireland finally emerged from that process: in 1937 a new Constitution was adopted and in 1949 the Republic was formally proclaimed. Places such as the GPO, Kilmainham Gaol and Glasnevin cemetery keep the memory of those founding years.
Few cities in the world have produced as many great writers as Dublin, to the point that Unesco named it a City of Literature in 2010. The Irish capital is the birthplace or home of four Nobel laureates — William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney — and of immortal figures such as Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift (dean of St Patrick's Cathedral and author of 'Gulliver's Travels'), Bram Stoker (creator of 'Dracula') and, above all as far as the city is concerned, James Joyce.
Joyce turned Dublin into literature like nobody else. His great novel, 'Ulysses' (1922), takes place entirely in the Dublin of a single day — 16 June 1904 — moving through its streets, pubs and squares in such minute detail that it was said that if the city disappeared it could be rebuilt from the book. In homage to that novel, every 16 June Dublin celebrates 'Bloomsday' (after the protagonist, Leopold Bloom), with readings, walks and people dressed in Edwardian style.
That literary tradition is still very much alive in the city. You can visit the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), the Dublin Writers Museum, the James Joyce Tower at Sandycove (where 'Ulysses' begins) or the Trinity College library, which holds the Book of Kells, a masterpiece of medieval illuminated manuscripts. And, of course, there is the life of the literary pubs in and around Temple Bar, where so many writers found inspiration. In Dublin, literature is part of the urban landscape and of the city's identity.
No history of Dublin is complete without Guinness. In 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a celebrated 9,000-year lease on the St James's Gate brewery, on the banks of the Liffey, to produce beer. From there would come the famous black stout with its creamy head that became one of Ireland's symbols around the world. Today the old brewery houses the Guinness Storehouse, the most visited tourist attraction in the country, which culminates in the Gravity Bar, a glass viewing room with panoramic views over the whole city while you drink the perfect pint.
Beer is bound up with another Dublin institution: the pub. The Irish pub is much more than a bar; it is the heart of social life, the place where people talk, where traditional music is played live (the 'sessions') and where community is woven. Districts such as Temple Bar concentrate the most touristy nightlife, but historic, centuries-old pubs with their own character survive across the city, where the 'craic' (good conversation and a festive atmosphere, an untranslatable word) is the real protagonist.
In recent decades Dublin has been transformed again. After centuries of poverty and emigration, from the 1990s Ireland lived through the economic boom known as the 'Celtic Tiger', which turned Dublin into a European technology and financial centre, home to the big internet companies and to a dynamic business district in the docklands (the 'Silicon Docks'). The 2008 crisis hit hard, but the city recovered. Today Dublin combines its Viking, medieval, Georgian and literary heritage with the energy of a young, cosmopolitan, open capital, without losing the warmth and the sense of humour that make it unmistakable.