About Galway

Curved around the scenic Galway Bay, Galway is Ireland's fastest growing city and a buzzing university town that hosts many different arts festival throughout the year.

Galway is also the departure point for the Aran Islands, celebrated by playwright J. M. Synge in Riders to the Sea. Here you'll hear lilting Irish spoken as a first language, just as it was a thousand years ago.

To the west of Galway are the wild shores and dark, brooding mountains of Connemara, loved by painters, writers, and seekers of silence. Towns like Clifden and Leenane (on Ireland's only fjord) ring out with the sound of pipe, whistle, and fiddle, as nearly every pub hosts wild and impromptu traditional-music sessions. It is another Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) and is known for its ponies -- descendants of the Andalusian horses that swam ashore from the Spanish fleet and bred with Celtic stock legendarily descended from Ice Age horses.

With the most westerly seaboard in Europe, the West remains a place apart -- the most Irish part of Ireland. Nature's magnificence awaits: the majestic Cliffs of Moher, the eerie expanse of the Burren, the "hidden kingdom" of Connemara, and the Aran Islands, which do constant battle with the stormy Atlantic. But there are also grand baronial houses to visit -- Ashford Castle and Kylemore Abbey -- and Galway, the city that loves to celebrate.

While you are here, why not book a tour around Galway or one of the other destinations in Ireland that you are visiting? Just click Galway, or one of the counties below to book your tour.

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Galway

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