🇮🇪 Ireland · Southwest (Kerry)
Killarney is the gateway to one of the most beautiful landscapes in Ireland: a world of still lakes, purple mountains, ancient woods, waterfalls and castles that looks like something out of a legend. On the shore of Lough Leane, in the heart of County Kerry, this tourist town is surrounded by Killarney National Park — the country's first — and for more than two centuries it has welcomed travellers who come to marvel at these landscapes, already famous in Victorian times.
The park is the star: the Victorian mansion of Muckross House and its gardens, the romantic ruin of the Franciscan friary at Muckross, Ross Castle looking out over the lake, the monastic island of Innisfallen, Torc Waterfall and the spectacular Gap of Dunloe among the highest mountains in Ireland. To all that is added the legendary Ring of Kerry, the scenic route around the Iveragh peninsula, and the summit of Carrauntoohil, the roof of the country. Killarney is also a byword for jaunting cars, the horse-drawn traps that take visitors around the park, a tradition with history behind it and some present-day debate.
This guide covers Killarney with a practical, warm eye: what to see in the national park and its surroundings, how to get around without getting lost among lakes and mountains, what admission costs, how to do the Ring of Kerry and what to bear in mind when driving Kerry's narrow roads. A destination for lovers of nature, history and the outdoors, and the best base for exploring the whole Irish southwest.
Killarney was born in the shadow of faith and of the lakes. Its first historic settlement was the monastery on Innisfallen island, founded around the year 640 by St Finian the Leper, whose monks wrote for centuries the Annals of Innisfallen, one of the great chronicles of medieval Ireland. After the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169, castles such as Ross Castle went up, built by the Gaelic O'Donoghue Mor clan at the end of the fifteenth century, and the Franciscan friary at Muckross was founded in 1448. The modern town was driven in the eighteenth century by the Browne family, viscounts of Kenmare, who promoted early tourism to these landscapes; the arrival of the railway in 1853 and Queen Victoria's visit in 1861 confirmed it as an international destination. The Great Famine (1845-1852) hit Kerry hard, with hunger, death and mass emigration that emptied the countryside. In 1932, the Muckross estate was donated to the Irish state and became the seed of Killarney National Park, the first in the country. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Atlantic Kerry: the monastery of Skellig Michael hanging above the ocean, the living Irish language on the Dingle peninsula, the Great Famine that hit the west especially hard, and Valentia, starting point of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.
Read the history of Southwest (Kerry) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before the town there were the lakes and the monks. The first historic settlement in the Killarney area was not on the mainland but on a wooded island in the middle of Lough Leane: Innisfallen. There, around the year 640, St Finian the Leper founded a monastery that would stay active for some 850 years, one of the great centres of learning in early Christian Ireland. At a time when Ireland was known as 'the island of saints and scholars', communities like this copied manuscripts, taught and kept written culture alive while much of Europe was going through dark centuries.
Innisfallen's great legacy is the Annals of Inisfallen, a chronicle written by its monks between the tenth and thirteenth centuries in a mixture of Latin and Irish. The Annals record, year by year, events in Irish history — kings, battles, deaths, famines, natural phenomena — and are one of the fundamental sources for understanding medieval Ireland, especially the south of the country. They are kept today in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. That those monks chose this island for their work says a great deal about the place: a corner of serene beauty and isolation that, centuries later, would go on drawing travellers from all over the world.
After the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, begun in 1169, power was organised around castles and clans. In the Killarney area the O'Donoghue Mors dominated, a Gaelic clan who at the end of the fifteenth century built Ross Castle on the shore of Lough Leane, along with the McCarthy Mors, lords of the region. In 1448 the McCarthys founded the Franciscan friary at Muckross, which would become the main burial place of the great local clans and of celebrated Irish-language poets. Church, castle and lake: the three elements that would define the Killarney landscape forever were already in place.
The early modern period brought Kerry the same upheavals that shook the whole of Ireland: English conquest, war and the fall of the old Gaelic order. Ross Castle, the O'Donoghue stronghold on Lough Leane, played its part in one of those episodes: it was one of the last places in Ireland to hold out against Oliver Cromwell's troops during the Cromwellian conquest, surrendering in 1652. According to an old prophecy, Ross Castle would only fall to an attack from the water; the English, tradition says, had boats hauled overland to the lake, and the garrison, believing the prophecy fulfilled, surrendered. History or legend, the castle changed hands and with it the power of the region.
From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much of the land in the area passed to the Browne family, viscounts (and later earls) of Kenmare, Catholic landowners of English origin. It was they who, in the eighteenth century, shaped the modern town of Killarney and, above all, had an intuition that would shape its destiny: to promote tourism. Driven by the European fashion for the 'picturesque' and the 'sublime' — the Romantic taste for wild landscapes of mountains and lakes — the Brownes began drawing visitors to the lakes of Killarney, built roads and viewpoints, and turned the area's natural beauty into an economic engine. By the end of the eighteenth century, travellers from England and the continent were already coming to marvel at these landscapes.
Another family, the Herberts of Muckross, built the elegant Victorian mansion of Muckross House beside the lake in 1843, surrounded by splendid gardens. The stage was set: Killarney was preparing, without quite knowing it, to become one of Ireland's first great tourist destinations, long before tourism was an industry. But before that came to pass, the town and the whole of Kerry would live through the greatest catastrophe in their history.
Between 1845 and 1852, Ireland lived through the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór), the worst catastrophe in its modern history, and County Kerry was among the hardest hit. It is worth telling accurately, because it is often badly summarised: it was not simply 'a potato famine'. Yes, the trigger was the blight (Phytophthora infestans), a fungus that ruined the potato harvests year after year. And yes, much of Ireland's poor rural population depended almost entirely on the potato to eat, in a system of tiny holdings and tenancies that centuries of land policy had pushed into that fragility. But mass hunger was also the product of human decisions.
During the worst years of the famine, Ireland went on exporting large quantities of food — grain, cattle, butter — to Britain, under the protection of property and trade. The response of the British government, dominated by a laissez-faire ideology (minimal state intervention and faith in the free market), was late and inadequate: badly paid public works, soup kitchens, and workhouses that were overwhelmed. In Killarney, the workhouse filled to overflowing and St Mary's Cathedral, still unfinished, was used as a hospital and shelter for the sick and destitute. Some people even preferred to be imprisoned in order to get something to eat.
The result was devastating. Across Ireland around a million people died of hunger and disease, and another million emigrated within a few years, many in terrible conditions aboard the so-called 'coffin ships' bound for America. Kerry, a poor rural county, lost an enormous share of its population between death and emigration, and many villages were left half empty. The Great Famine left a deep wound in Irish society — in the demography, in the Irish language (which retreated still further) and in the relationship with Britain — and for generations it fed both emigration and nationalist feeling. Killarney, like all of Kerry, carried that trauma even as it was beginning to flourish as a tourist destination.
Almost at the same time as the shadow of the famine, another Killarney was beginning to grow: the one of travellers. The great leap came with the railway, which reached the town in July 1853. Suddenly the lakes and mountains that only a few aristocrats had seen were within reach of the growing Victorian middle class, who could arrive by train from Dublin or Cork. Hotels were built, boat trips on the lakes and trap excursions through the park were organised, and the jaunting cars and jarveys (drivers) who still take visitors around today were born: tourism was becoming a profession.
The definitive endorsement was Queen Victoria's visit in 1861. The British sovereign spent several days in Killarney, stayed at Muckross House — whose owners, the Herberts, carried out major works to receive her — and toured the lakes and the mountains. The enormous coverage of that royal visit, reported by the press across the empire, put Killarney on the international map as one of the most beautiful destinations in the British Isles. A viewpoint over the lakes and mountains was named Ladies View forever, because, tradition says, the queen's ladies-in-waiting were captivated by the view.
From then on, tourism became the axis of life in Killarney, an early and unusual case of an Irish town living mainly by showing off its landscape. Writers, painters and Romantic travellers — from William Thackeray to Alfred Tennyson — sang the beauty of its lakes. The town filled with hotels and guides, and 'seeing Killarney' became a classic stage of any grand tour of Ireland. That vocation for tourism, born in the eighteenth century with the Brownes and confirmed in the nineteenth, is still the town's identity and its livelihood today.
The twentieth century brought a decisive turn for the conservation of these landscapes. In 1911, the American Bourn Vincent family — the magnate William Bowers Bourn, his daughter Maud and his son-in-law Arthur Rose Vincent — bought the Muckross estate, with its mansion, its gardens and its thousands of hectares of lakes, woods and mountains. After Maud's early death in 1929, the family took a generous and far-sighted decision: in 1932 they donated the whole property to the newly born Irish Free State, on condition that it be preserved for public enjoyment.
That donation was the seed of Killarney National Park (the Bourn Vincent Memorial Park), the first in Ireland. Over time the state extended its boundaries to the more than 100 km² of today, protecting the largest remaining native woodland in the country, Ireland's only continuous herd of red deer, the three glacial lakes and a natural heritage that Unesco recognised as a Biosphere Reserve. Inside the park stand Muckross House, Muckross Abbey, Ross Castle, Innisfallen, Torc Waterfall and the road towards the Gap of Dunloe: centuries of history and nature gathered in one protected space.
The Killarney of today is a town of around 14,000 inhabitants that lives, more than ever, on tourism: it receives around a million visitors a year, it is the starting point of the celebrated Ring of Kerry and one of the most popular bases for exploring the whole southwest of Ireland. It has won national awards as the tidiest, best-kept town, and it combines the buzz of its pubs with live music with the calm of the lakes a few minutes' walk away. From the monks of Innisfallen to today's visitors, by way of the Gaelic clans, the famine and Queen Victoria, Killarney has made its landscape into its history, its identity and its future.