🇮🇪 Ireland · West and North
If Dublin is the capital and Cork the southern rival, Galway is the bohemian heart of Ireland. It is a small, walkable city where something is always happening: buskers on Quay Street, pubs where traditional music plays every night, artists, students, sailors and travellers mixed together in a maze of coloured medieval streets. Here the river Corrib rushes towards the Atlantic, the air smells of the sea and life spills onto the street the moment the sun appears.
Galway carries centuries of history on every corner. It was the Norman city of the 'Fourteen Tribes', the merchant clans who governed it and traded with Spain and France; it keeps the Spanish Arch from its walls, the medieval church of St Nicholas, the Claddagh — the old fishing quarter that gave its name to the famous ring of love and friendship — and a monumental cathedral by the river. It was European Capital of Culture in 2020 and it is a land of festivals: the international arts festival in July, the horse races, the oyster festival.
This guide covers Galway with a practical, warm eye: what to see in its medieval core and its Latin Quarter, where to hear the best music, how the Claddagh ring works, how to use the city as a base for Connemara, the Aran Islands and the Cliffs of Moher, and how to get there and get around. A friendly warning: Galway is addictive. Many people come for a day and stay a week, hypnotised by its music, its people and that sense of being at the last corner of Europe before the ocean.
Galway grew up as a settlement around a ford on the river Corrib and expanded with the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the thirteenth century, when the De Burgh (De Burgo) family built a castle and a walled town. In time, fourteen merchant families — the Lynches, Blakes, Joyces, Martins, Frenches and others — took control and governed the city-state for centuries: these are the celebrated 'Fourteen Tribes of Galway'. The city prospered on maritime trade, above all with Spain and France, which left traces such as the Spanish Arch. From this era comes the legend of Mayor James Lynch, who in 1493 is said to have hanged his own son for murder (a story now regarded as a myth and which, to be clear, is NOT the origin of the word 'lynching'). In 1652, after a long siege, Oliver Cromwell's forces took Galway and its decline began; the Great Famine of the nineteenth century hit the city and its region very hard. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Galway rose again as Ireland's cultural capital, home to a large university and European Capital of Culture in 2020. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Atlantic west and the north: Galway and its Fourteen Tribes, the Connemara of the famine roads and Kylemore, the Aran Islands as a refuge of the Irish language, the Cliffs of Moher above the karst of the Burren, and the Giant's Causeway, in Northern Ireland (United Kingdom), with its geology and the plantation of Ulster.
Read the history of West and North →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Galway was born where the river Corrib rushes towards the Atlantic, at a ford that for centuries was the obligatory crossing between the lands north and south of the bay. Its Irish name, Gaillimh, is associated with that river and with a legend about Gaillimh, the daughter of a legendary chief who is said to have drowned in its waters. Before the town existed, the area was Gaelic territory contested between clans such as the Ó Flaithbheartaigh (O'Flahertys), lords of the wild west of Connemara.
The decisive leap came in the thirteenth century with the Anglo-Norman invasion. Around 1232, the powerful De Burgh family (De Burgo, later Gaelicised as Burke), Anglo-Norman lords of Connacht, took control of the area and built a castle beside the ford. Around that fortress a settlement grew that was soon ringed with stone walls, towers and gates, to protect it from the surrounding Gaelic clans, who viewed the newcomers with hostility. So Galway was born as a walled town, an Anglo-Norman island in the middle of a Gaelic sea.
That tension shaped its identity. Galway became a town proud of its English, commercial character, jealously separate from the Gaelic Ireland around it. A famous fifteenth-century municipal decree even warned the townspeople against the customs of the O'Flahertys, and over one of the town gates, tradition says, the prayer could be read: 'From the fury of the O'Flahertys, good Lord deliver us.' The town looked out to the sea and to Europe, turning its back on the mountains of the west.
The De Burghs' power over the town gradually faded, and in 1396 a royal decree of Richard II established that Galway should elect a 'sovereign' (a kind of mayor) each year, opening the way for government to pass into the hands of the merchant families. In time, fourteen commercial clans concentrated the town's wealth and administration for centuries. These are the celebrated 'Tribes of Galway': Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, D'Arcy, Deane, Font, French, Joyce, Kirwan, Lynch, Martin, Morris and Skerrett. Almost all were of Anglo-Norman origin, and several intermarried to form a closed oligarchy.
These families made Galway a prosperous trading port, one of the main ones in Ireland, turned towards the Atlantic. Its great partner was southern Europe: Galway ships traded intensively with Spain and also with France and Portugal, exporting fish, wool and hides and importing wine, salt, spices and cloth. That link with Spain is so strong that it left its mark on the town's landscape and legend: the Spanish Arch, built in 1584 as an extension of the walls, recalls the quays where the Iberian ships unloaded, and people still speak today of Galway's 'Spanish influence'.
The merchants built stone houses with carved details — such as Lynch's Castle, the Lynch family's urban tower house that can still be seen in the centre — funded churches and gave the town a cosmopolitan air. Galway lived a golden age. The nickname 'City of the Tribes' in fact came later, in the seventeenth century, as a jibe from Cromwell's forces against those tightly knit families; Galwegians, with pride, adopted it as an emblem and carry it to this day.
No history of Galway is told without the legend of Mayor Lynch, one of those tales the city repeats with relish even though historians doubt it. The traditional version goes like this: in 1493, James Lynch fitz Stephen, a powerful merchant serving as mayor of Galway, condemned his own son, Walter, to death for murdering a young visitor — according to some versions, a Spanish sailor. When no executioner would carry out the sentence and the townspeople were pleading for mercy, Lynch himself, rather than betray the law, is said to have hanged his son with his own hands from a window of his house. There is even a spot in the city, the so-called Lynch's Window, that tradition points to as the scene of the event.
It is a powerful story about inflexible justice overriding a father's love. The problem is that it almost certainly did not happen. The historian James Mitchell, who studied the matter thoroughly, holds that it is a myth: the numerous records of the period mention nothing of the kind, and the first written version of the story does not appear until 1807, in a novel. In other words: the legend is more than three centuries later than the events it claims to describe. It is one of those stories that, as they say in Galway, should not be ruined with the truth.
And one very widespread misunderstanding is worth clearing up: the English word 'lynching' does NOT come from this Galway Lynch. It is an etymological myth. The American term almost certainly derives from the 'Lynch law' associated with much later figures in Virginia, in the eighteenth century (such as Charles Lynch), with no connection whatsoever to the medieval Irish mayor. The coincidence of surnames fed the confusion, but they are completely separate stories. The legend of Mayor Lynch is a treasure of Galway folklore; its supposed connection with the word 'lynching' is just that, a coincidence turned into a tale.
Galway's golden age ended abruptly in the seventeenth century. During the wars that devastated Ireland after the 1641 rebellion, the town took the side of the Catholic and Irish cause against the English parliament. The reprisal was brutal. In 1651-1652, after Oliver Cromwell's campaign in Ireland, parliamentary forces laid siege to Galway. The walled town held out for months, but hunger and plague did their work, and in 1652 it surrendered. With Cromwell's victory, many of the Tribes' families were stripped of their property and banished, and the power of the old merchant oligarchy collapsed.
The fall was followed by a long decline. Galway lost its trade, its population and its influence. A second siege, in 1691, during the Williamite war, confirmed the town's ruin, leaving it a shadow of its former splendour. Through the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, Galway was an impoverished, peripheral town, far from the circuits of power in an Ireland governed from Dublin and London.
The most devastating blow came with the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór) of 1845-1852. The west of Ireland, and County Galway in particular, was among the areas hardest hit by the failure of the potato harvest on which the poor depended. Hunger, disease and mass emigration emptied both country and town: hundreds of thousands of people died or left by ship for America. The region of Connemara and the islands carried the scars of that catastrophe for generations, and it also accelerated the retreat of the Irish language. Galway hit bottom.
Galway's rebirth was slow but deep. In 1845 the Queen's College (today the University of Galway) was founded, which in time would make the city a major university centre, young and dynamic. Through the twentieth century, and above all after Irish independence in 1922, Galway gradually recovered population, energy and pride. Its closeness to the Gaeltacht — the areas where Irish is still the everyday language, such as Connemara and the Aran Islands — made it a stronghold of Gaelic language and culture: An Taibhdhearc, the national Irish-language theatre, was founded here in 1928, and today Irish-language media and an audiovisual industry operate in the city.
In recent decades, Galway reinvented itself as the cultural and bohemian capital of Ireland. Its human scale, its university, its musical tradition and its artistic atmosphere made it irresistible. The city filled with festivals that are now part of its identity: the Galway International Arts Festival in July, one of the most important in the country; the Galway Races, the great horse-racing celebration at Ballybrit in late July; the international oyster festival in September; and many more for film, literature and music. In its pubs, traditional Irish music plays every night, not as a show for tourists but as something living and everyday.
The recognition culminated in 2020, when Galway was European Capital of Culture, a title that celebrated its role as the gateway to the Irish-speaking west and as a creative crucible. Today Galway combines its medieval inheritance — the Spanish Arch, St Nicholas' Church, the streets of the Tribes — with the vitality of a university, multicultural, festive city. It is, for many, the most 'Irish' city in Ireland: the place where you hear Gaelic on the street, where the Atlantic sets the rhythm and where, as Steve Earle's famous song 'Galway Girl' has it, one night of music is enough to get you hooked. The city Cromwell set out to humble is today one of the cultural hearts of Europe.