5 Days in Dublin

Start the way Dublin does on a slow morning: a full Irish breakfast. That means rashers (back bacon), sausages, black and white pudding, eggs, grilled tomato and toast or brown bread, with a pot of strong tea. It's a weekend ritual more than a daily habit, and it's meant to carry you through to the afternoon.

Bewley's on Grafton Street has served Dubliners since 1927 under its stained-glass windows by Harry Clarke, the great Irish glass artist of the 1920s. Queen of Tarts, on Cow's Lane in Temple Bar, is the smaller and cozier alternative.

Trinity College was founded by Elizabeth I in 1592 to educate a Protestant elite. From 1871 until 1970 it was the Catholic bishops who banned their flock from studying here without special permission. Walk in through the main gate on College Green into Front Square, with its cobbles and bell tower, and you're in the most beautiful acre of the city.

The reason for the queue is the Book of Kells, a gospel book made around 800 by monks of the island monastery of Iona, in Scotland, and probably finished at Kells, northwest of Dublin, after Viking raids drove them there. Two volumes are on display at a time, open at a different page every few months. Upstairs is the Long Room, the 65-meter library hall that every picture of Dublin seems to show. Its books were taken down in 2024 for a long conservation project, so the shelves are mostly empty, which is strange but still impressive.

Five minutes away on Kildare Street, the National Museum of Archaeology is free and better than anything you pay for in Dublin. The Treasury holds the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara Brooch, the two masterpieces of early Christian Irish metalwork, and the gold room is full of Bronze Age collars and torcs.

The room people remember is Kingship and Sacrifice: Iron Age men found preserved in Irish bogs, some of them killed ritually more than 2,000 years ago, with skin, hair and even fingernails intact. It's quiet, dim and unsettling in the right way.

Walk past Leinster House, the Irish parliament, to Merrion Square, the grandest of Dublin's Georgian squares: four sides of red-brick houses with painted doors and fanlights, built in the second half of the 1700s, when Dublin was one of the largest and richest cities in Europe. In the corner of the park, Oscar Wilde lounges on a rock in a green smoking jacket, looking across at No. 1, the house where he grew up. Danny Osborne carved him in 1997 from colored stones from around the world.

On the west side of the square is the National Gallery of Ireland, free and worth an hour for Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ, which turned up in 1990 hanging in a Jesuit house in Leeson Street, where nobody knew what it was, and for the room of paintings by Jack B. Yeats, the poet's brother.

St Stephen's Green is the city's favorite park, a Victorian garden of lawns, ponds and ducks given to the public by the Guinness family in 1880. In Easter week 1916, rebels of the Irish Citizen Army, with Countess Markievicz among their officers, dug trenches here, which turned out to be a bad idea in a park overlooked by tall buildings. It's said the shooting stopped every day so the park keeper could feed the ducks. He did feed them all week, but the daily ceasefire is probably a later embellishment.

If you have the energy, the Little Museum of Dublin on the north side tells the city's 20th century in objects donated by Dubliners, on a funny 30-minute guided tour, and on the south side the Museum of Literature Ireland keeps Joyce's own copy number one of Ulysses. If not, keep them for the free morning on day four. Behind the museum, the Iveagh Gardens are where locals go when the Green is too busy. From the Green, walk down Grafton Street, the main shopping street, for the buskers. Around the corner on Suffolk Street is the statue of Molly Malone, the fishmonger from the song. She never existed. Tour groups started a habit of groping the statue "for luck", and the city now has stewards there to stop it, so don't.

Dublin's best pubs are old, dark, wood-paneled rooms with snugs (small private booths) and no TV, and several of the finest are within five minutes of St Stephen's Green. Kehoe's on South Anne Street still has its Victorian snug and back room, Grogan's on South William Street is where writers and painters drink, The Stag's Head is a Victorian gem of mahogany and stained glass, Toners on Baggot Street is the one Yeats is said to have visited once, and The Long Hall on South Great George's Street is all mirrors, red walls and clocks. Order a pint and let it settle: a proper Guinness is poured in two stages and should take about two minutes.

Then go to O'Donoghue's on Merrion Row, where The Dubliners started playing in the 1960s. There's traditional music most nights, in the front bar or out in the yard.

If you see one thing in Dublin, make it Kilmainham Gaol. It opened in 1796, and almost every Irish rebellion after that ended here, from 1798 and Robert Emmet in 1803 to the Fenians and the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. In May 1916, fourteen men were shot in the Stonebreakers' Yard. James Connolly, too badly wounded to stand, was shot sitting in a chair. Joseph Plunkett married Grace Gifford in the prison chapel a few hours before his execution.

The Rising itself had little public support when it happened. It was the executions, one after another over nine days, that turned Dublin towards the rebels. The tour takes you through the dark old cells, the chapel and the yard, and ends in the bright Victorian wing you may recognize from films. The last prisoner, Éamon de Valera, later president of Ireland, walked out in 1924.

Ten minutes' walk east, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham was built in 1684 as a home for old soldiers, modeled on Les Invalides in Paris, and it's the finest 17th-century building in Ireland. It now holds the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), which is free (closed on Mondays, and on Wednesdays the galleries open only at 11:30), but even if contemporary art isn't your thing, walk through the great courtyard and down to the formal gardens, which almost nobody visits.

In 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on a small, disused brewery at St James's Gate for 45 pounds a year. Within a century it was the biggest brewery in Ireland, and later in the world. The Guinness Storehouse, in a 1904 fermentation building, tells the story over seven floors built around an atrium in the shape of a pint glass.

Locals will tell you it's a tourist trap, and the exhibition is basically a very good advert. But it is the most visited paid attraction in Ireland for a reason: the pint at the end, in the round Gravity Bar on the roof with a 360-degree view over the city to the mountains, is as fresh as Guinness gets.

Walk 20 minutes back towards the center through the Liberties, stopping for a late lunch on the way (the cafés around Francis Street and Clanbrassil Street are good) or for a tasting at Teeling, the first new whiskey distillery in Dublin in more than a century, on Newmarket Square. The Liberties are the old working-class quarter that grew up around the breweries and distilleries. St Patrick's Cathedral was built in the 1200s next to a well where Saint Patrick is said to have baptized converts, and it's the national cathedral of the Church of Ireland, the Anglican church. By the 1800s it was close to falling down, and it was Benjamin Lee Guinness, the brewer, who paid to restore it.

Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, was dean here from 1713 to 1745, and he's buried in the nave next to Stella, the woman he loved. Look for the old wooden door with a hole cut in it. In 1492, the story goes, two feuding earls made peace through that hole, one daring to put his arm through first, which is where the Irish phrase "chancing your arm" comes from. Next door is Marsh's Library (8 EUR, closed on Sundays and Mondays), opened in 1707 as the first public library in Ireland, with the wire cages where readers were once locked in with the rarest books.

Five minutes north is Dublin's other medieval cathedral, which is older. Christ Church was founded around 1030 by Sitric Silkbeard, the Viking king of Dublin, and rebuilt in stone by the Normans after they took the city in 1170. Inside is a tomb said to be Strongbow's, the Norman lord who led that invasion, though the effigy is probably someone else.

The best part is underground: the crypt, the oldest structure in Dublin, where the star is a mummified cat and rat found stuck in an organ pipe, frozen in the middle of the chase. A covered bridge over the road leads to Dublinia, a hands-on museum of Viking and medieval Dublin that's good if you have children with you.

Walk down to the river for dinner at the Brazen Head, which calls itself Ireland's oldest pub, established 1198. Nobody can prove the date, and the building you see is from the 1700s, but there's been an inn on this spot for a very long time, and Robert Emmet is said to have planned his rising in one of its rooms. Order Irish stew or bacon and cabbage, then stay for the music: there are traditional sessions every night.

Afterwards, follow the quays east to the Ha'penny Bridge, the white iron footbridge from 1816, named after the half-penny toll people paid to cross it, and look into Temple Bar on the south side. It's the city's party quarter, cobbled, loud and fun for an hour, but locals won't drink there: a pint costs more than anywhere else in town.

On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, a few hundred rebels took over the General Post Office on O'Connell Street, and Patrick Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from its steps. By Friday the building was burning around them, and they escaped through the side streets into the houses of Moore Street, around the corner. From No. 16 Moore Street, on Saturday 29 April, the leaders decided to surrender. Touch the columns: the holes are bullet marks. It's still a working post office, and the GPO Museum inside tells the story of the week well, from both sides.

Out on O'Connell Street, the widest street in the city, look for Daniel O'Connell's monument at the bridge end, also scarred by bullets, and the Spire, a 120-meter steel needle put up in 2003 where Nelson's Pillar stood until republicans blew it up in 1966.

At the top of O'Connell Street, the Garden of Remembrance was opened in 1966, fifty years after the Rising, for everyone who died for Irish freedom. Its long pool ends in Oisín Kelly's sculpture of the Children of Lir, added in 1971, from the legend of four children turned into swans for 900 years.

Across Parnell Square, the Hugh Lane Gallery is free (closed on Mondays), and its strangest exhibit is Francis Bacon's whole London studio, moved here piece by piece after his death, with its chaos of brushes, rags and torn photos exactly as he left it. Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909. Around the corner on North Great George's Street, the James Joyce Centre is the place for anything Ulysses.

Henrietta Street was the grandest address in Georgian Dublin, built for bishops, lords and lawyers in the 1720s and 30s. Then, after the Act of Union of 1800 moved the parliament to London, the rich left, and these same mansions became tenements: by 1911, more than a hundred people lived in No. 14 alone, a family to a room, sharing one toilet in the yard.

The museum follows the house through both lives, with rooms restored to each period and recorded voices of people who grew up in them, and it's the best place in the city to understand how most Dubliners actually lived until the 1960s. The tour is moving without being sentimental.

Take a bus or a short taxi north to Glasnevin Cemetery, opened in 1832 by Daniel O'Connell as a place where people of all religions and none could be buried with their own rites, at a time when Catholics were restricted in the old Protestant churchyards. It's Ireland's national cemetery now, with more than a million and a half people buried here. O'Connell lies under the round tower, and nearby are Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera and Constance Markievicz.

Take the guided tour if you can, and climb the O'Connell Tower for the view. The guides are excellent, and the story of how a country fought itself in the Civil War of 1922-23 makes more sense standing between the graves of men who were friends, then enemies.

By the old back gate of the cemetery is John Kavanagh's, opened in 1833 and run by the same family ever since. Everybody calls it the Gravediggers, because the men who dug the graves next door were said to tap on the wall for a pint to be passed through. There's no music and no TV, just wooden booths, it's cash only, and children aren't allowed in the bar, and many Dubliners will tell you it pours the best Guinness in the city.

Food is served in the lounge from Tuesday to Saturday, from lunchtime. Order the coddle if it's on. Dublin coddle is the city's own dish, a stew of sausages, rashers, potatoes and onions simmered slowly in stock, traditionally made at the end of the week to use up whatever was left in the house. It looks pale and plain and tastes like a Dublin grandmother's kitchen.

Back in town, head for Smithfield, the old cobbled market square west of the center, and the Cobblestone, which locals call the home of traditional music in Dublin. There's a session every night, in the front bar, where musicians sit around a table and play reels, jigs and slow airs for each other rather than for an audience. Find a place to stand, keep quiet during the songs, and don't ask for "Whiskey in the Jar".

Two minutes away, St Michan's Church has mummified bodies in its vaults, on short drop-in tours from Monday to Thursday, and Bram Stoker is said to have visited as a boy. If you want a whiskey first, the old Jameson distillery on Bow Street, around the corner, does tours and tastings. Jameson hasn't actually been made in Dublin since the 1970s, when production moved to Midleton in County Cork.

Get off the bus in Laragh, the village a kilometer before the monastery, and start with lunch. Wicklow is sheep country, so this is the place for Irish stew: mutton or lamb slow-cooked with potatoes, onions and sometimes carrots, nothing more. The argument about whether carrots belong in it has been going on for a century. Have it with brown soda bread and butter at Lynham's, the village pub, or at the Wicklow Heather across the road, then walk the 15 minutes to the monastery along the river.

Saint Kevin came to this valley in the 6th century to live as a hermit, and by the time he died a monastery had grown up around him that became one of the great schools of early Christian Ireland. Vikings raided it, the English burned it in 1398, and pilgrims kept coming anyway. What's left is a graveyard full of Celtic crosses, the ruined cathedral, a little stone church with a round belfry that everyone calls St Kevin's Kitchen, and the round tower, about 30 meters high, where the monks could ring a bell and hide their treasures.

Enter through the old stone gateway, the only one of its kind left in Ireland. The OPW visitor center by the car park has a short film that puts the ruins in context.

From the monastery, the Green Road runs along the Lower Lake to the Upper Lake, a flat walk of about 2 km through oak woods. The lake below the cliffs, dark and still, is the reason Kevin chose the place, and St Kevin's Bed, a cave in the rock face above the water, is where he's said to have slept.

Above the lake runs the Spinc, a boardwalk along the top of the cliffs with the best view in Wicklow. The full loop, the white route, is 9 km and takes three and a half to four hours, which doesn't fit between the buses with lunch, but on a day tour or with a car it's the walk to do.

Back in Dublin, tired and hungry, do what Dubliners have done since 1913: get fish and chips at Leo Burdock on Werburgh Street, by Christ Church. It's a takeaway, so eat them out of the paper on a bench in St Audoen's Park, two minutes away. Cod is the classic, with salt and vinegar. If you want the more Irish version, ask for a battered sausage on the side.

Howth is a fishing village that Dubliners treat as their back garden. From the station, walk along the harbor and up onto the cliff path around Howth Head, a narrow track along the edge of the cliffs above the sea, with seabirds below and Dublin Bay opening up as you go. The Cliff Path Loop takes about two hours. The longer Bog of Frogs loop, about 12 km and three hours, goes all the way round to the Baily Lighthouse at the southern tip and back over the top, with a view over the bay, the city and the Wicklow Mountains.

Back at the harbor, look for the seals that wait by the fish shops on the West Pier for scraps, and Ireland's Eye, the small island just offshore. Boats from the pier go around it, and in spring and early summer there are puffins.

Howth is where the boats come in, so have lunch on the West Pier, lined with fish shops and seafood restaurants, or graze the weekend market by the station. Dublin Bay prawns are the local specialty (they're actually langoustines), and the chowder, a thick, creamy soup of fish and shellfish with brown bread, is the Irish way to warm up after a cold walk. Beshoff Bros on Harbour Road does fish and chips, and Octopussy's and Aqua on the West Pier serve prawns, oysters and the catch of the day.

Take the DART back to Connolly and walk down to the river. On Custom House Quay, Rowan Gillespie's bronze figures walk towards the ships, starving, carrying their children and a few possessions. They remember the Great Famine of 1845-52, when the potato crop failed year after year, about a million people died and another million left, many from this quay. Ireland's population still hasn't recovered to what it was before.

Next to them, in a 19th-century warehouse, EPIC tells the story of the ten million people who have left Ireland over the centuries, and what they did in the world. It's interactive, clever and surprisingly moving, and the best museum in Dublin for anyone with Irish roots.

Moored on the quay is the Jeanie Johnston, a replica of an 1847 emigrant ship that never lost a passenger on its crossings to America. Guided tours go below deck every half hour, and EPIC sells a combined ticket.

Walk back west along the quay to the Custom House, James Gandon's great domed building from 1791 and the finest Georgian façade in the city. In May 1921 the IRA set it on fire to destroy the records of British rule, and the dome you see was rebuilt.

Then turn east to see the other Dublin. The Docklands were derelict in the 1980s. Since then glass offices, apartments and the headquarters of Google, Meta and half the tech industry in Europe have gone up along the river, which is why locals call it Silicon Docks. The Samuel Beckett Bridge, by Santiago Calatrava, is shaped like a harp lying on its side, the symbol of Ireland.

For the last night, see a play. The Abbey Theatre was founded in 1904 by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory as Ireland's national theater, and audiences have rioted twice in its history: over J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, and over Seán O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, about the Rising, in 1926. The building is a plain 1960s one, but what's on stage is still the best of Irish writing, old and new.

Afterwards, have a last pint at Mulligan's on Poolbeg Street, ten minutes away, one of the old pubs that Joyce wrote into Dubliners.