Explore Dublin

The Guinness Storehouse is a visitor centre in a former fermentation building of the St James's Gate brewery, opened to the public in 2000. Its seven floors surround a glass atrium and cover the brewing process, the company's founder Arthur Guinness and its advertising. The Gravity Bar on the top floor looks out over Dublin.

Pearse Lyons Distillery occupies the former St James' Church on James's Street, a Church of Ireland church whose present building was designed by Joseph Welland in 1859. Pearse Lyons bought it in 2014 and restored it as a distillery, which opened in 2017. Guided tours show the stills inside the former church, the stained glass and the old graveyard.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art holds the national collection of modern and contemporary art, more than 3,500 works, most of them made after 1940. It opened in 1991 in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, a home for retired soldiers founded in 1684 and modelled on Les Invalides in Paris, set around a large courtyard with formal gardens.

Dublin Zoo covers about 28 hectares of Phoenix Park. Laid out to a design by Decimus Burton, it opened in 1831 and is one of the oldest zoos in the world. Around 400 animals of some 100 species live in habitats such as the African Savanna, the Kaziranga Forest Trail, the Gorilla Rainforest and Sea Lion Cove.

Kilmainham Gaol is a former prison in west Dublin, opened in 1796 and closed in 1924. Many Irish rebels were held here, and leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed in its Stonebreakers' Yard. Restored by volunteers, it opened as a museum in 1966; it is run by the Office of Public Works and seen on a guided tour.

Phoenix Park is a walled public park of 707 hectares west of Dublin's city centre, laid out as a royal deer park by the Duke of Ormond in 1662. A herd of fallow deer still roams its grassland. The park holds Áras an Uachtaráin, the president's residence, the Wellington Monument obelisk, the Papal Cross and Dublin Zoo.

Malahide Castle stands in a parkland estate of about 100 hectares north of Dublin; its oldest parts date from the 12th century, and the Talbot family lived here from 1185 until 1976, apart from the years 1649 to 1660. Guided tours show the furnished rooms and the Great Hall, and the grounds hold walled gardens, a butterfly house and a fairy trail.