Explore Dublin

The Ha'penny Bridge is a cast-iron footbridge over the River Liffey, opened in 1816 to replace a ferry service. Its ribs were cast in Shropshire by the Coalbrookdale Company, and until 1919 everyone crossing paid a halfpenny toll at turnstiles. Its official name is the Liffey Bridge; it was restored and repainted white in 2001.

Trinity College Dublin was founded in 1592 by royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I and is Ireland's oldest university. Its walled campus in the city centre is laid out around cobbled squares such as Parliament Square, Front Square with its campanile, and Library Square, lined by Georgian and Victorian buildings.

The National Gallery of Ireland holds the national collection of Irish and European art. Founded in 1854, it opened in 1864 in a building by Francis Fowke on Merrion Square West, later extended with the Milltown, Beit and Millennium wings. The collection spans Irish painting, Italian Baroque art and Dutch masters, from Vermeer to Jack B. Yeats.

The National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology on Kildare Street opened in 1890 in a Palladian building by Thomas Newenham Deane and his son Thomas Manly Deane, entered through a domed rotunda. It shows Irish antiquities from the Stone Age to the late Middle Ages, including bog bodies, prehistoric gold, Viking finds and medieval church metalwork.

St Stephen's Green is a Victorian park of about nine hectares at the top of Grafton Street, laid out by William Sheppard and reopened to the public by Lord Ardilaun in 1880. Paths lead past a lake with ducks and swans, a bandstand, flowerbeds around fountains, a garden for the blind and memorials such as the Fusiliers' Arch.

Merrion Square is a Georgian garden square laid out from 1762 for the Fitzwilliam estate, lined on three sides by red-brick townhouses with coloured doors and fanlights. Oscar Wilde grew up at No. 1 and W. B. Yeats lived at No. 82. The railed central garden is a public park, with a statue of Wilde reclining on a rock opposite his childhood home.

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.