The rivalry between Dublin and Galway is the Irish version of a civic argument that exists in most countries with a dominant capital and a secondary city that suspects, with some justification, that it is more interesting than the place everyone else goes. Dublin is the capital, the economic centre, the city of the Book of Kells and the Guinness Storehouse and the Temple Bar tourist district that processes several million visitors per year with the efficiency of a well-managed theme park. Galway is the cultural capital of the west — a medieval city of 80,000 people on the edge of Galway Bay, two hours and fifteen minutes from Dublin by train, with a traditional music scene that is the most alive and the least performed-for-tourists in Ireland, an Atlantic coastline of extraordinary violence and beauty, the Aran Islands twelve kilometres offshore on the edge of the North Atlantic, the Connemara wilderness immediately to the north and west, and the Galway Oyster Festival each September that is the finest argument for the specific genius of the Irish half-shell available anywhere in the world. People who have been to both Dublin and Galway tend to spend more time talking about Galway afterwards. This is the pattern that the city consistently produces and that Dublin’s tourist infrastructure consistently fails to replicate, because what Galway has — the music in the pubs, the Atlantic light, the proximity of the wildest landscape in Ireland — is not the kind of thing that can be manufactured at scale or packaged for efficient delivery. It simply is there, at the western edge of Europe, and has been since before anyone thought to count.

The City: Medieval Streets, the Spanish Arch, and the Traditional Music That Never Stops

Galway’s medieval city core — the street plan still largely following the layout of the walled town that the Lynch family (the dominant merchant family for two centuries) controlled in the 14th and 15th centuries — is compact enough to walk entirely in an hour and interesting enough to spend a full day in without exhausting what it contains. The Spanish Arch, a remnant of the 16th-century town walls built to protect the quays where the wine trade with Spain was conducted, is the architectural reference point of the city, its stones incorporating the wool and wine merchants’ economic history in a way that the plaque beside it cannot fully convey. Shop Street and Quay Street and their connecting lanes are the commercial and social heart of the medieval city — the shop fronts in their original medieval proportions, the traditional pubs (Tigh Coilí, The Crane Bar, Tig Cóilí near the market) that have been presenting traditional Irish music in the Connacht style every day without interruption for decades, the buskers whose quality in Galway is consistently higher than the quality of the indoor acts in most cities. The traditional music of Galway — the flute and fiddle and uilleann pipes of the Connacht tradition, the sean-nós (old style) singing in Irish that is specific to this region — is not a tourist product in the way that the Celtic Tiger years tried to make it one. It is the music of people who play because they play, in sessions that start when enough musicians arrive and end when they decide to stop, and that a visitor can sit at the edge of in a Galway pub on a Tuesday night and hear music of a quality and an authenticity that the international folk festival circuit charges significant ticket prices to approximate. The Galway International Arts Festival in July and the Galway Film Fleadh in the same month are the events that bring the city to international attention; the city without the festivals is a place that does not need them to be excellent.

The Aran Islands: The Atlantic Edge at Its Most Elemental

The three Aran Islands — Inishmore (Inis Mór), Inishmaan (Inis Meáin), and Inisheer (Inis Oírr) — lie in Galway Bay twelve kilometres west of the Galway coastline, on the geological continuation of the Burren limestone formation of County Clare, and they are among the most visited yet still most extraordinary places in Ireland. The ferry from Rossaveel (45 minutes) or the flight from Connemara Airport (eight minutes, in a nine-seat Britten-Norman Islander) to Inishmore delivers you to an island of 800 people, 3,000 kilometres of drystone walls dividing a landscape of bare grey limestone into tiny fields, and Dún Aengus — a prehistoric cliff fort of approximately 1100 BC perched on the edge of a 100-metre Atlantic cliff, the outer semicircle of its chevaux-de-frise (the field of jagged standing stones designed to impede cavalry) still intact, the inner wall and the cliff edge creating an enclosure that has been standing, in some form, for 3,000 years with nothing beyond it but the North Atlantic. Standing at the cliff edge of Dún Aengus on a clear day — the Atlantic stretching west to America, the Twelve Bens mountain range of Connemara visible to the north, the other Aran Islands to the south — is one of those genuinely elemental experiences that very few landscapes in Europe provide: the feeling of being at the actual edge of the known world, in a place where humans have been standing at the same edge for three millennia, and where the wind from the Atlantic makes the concept of modernity irrelevant. Inishmaan and Inisheer are smaller, quieter, and less visited — the ferry timetable to the smaller islands makes day trips difficult — and both reward an overnight stay that most visitors do not take but that the islands’ smaller guest houses provide. The Irish spoken on the Aran Islands is the most intact spoken Irish in the country, and the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking community) character of all three islands is not a cultural performance; it is the daily language of people who have been speaking Irish since before the English arrived.

Connemara, the Twelve Bens, and the Wilderness Behind the City

The Connemara landscape — the bogland and mountain and lough country that begins immediately north and west of Galway city and extends for 100 kilometres to the Atlantic coast at Clifden — is the wildest and in many ways the most beautiful landscape in Ireland: a terrain of exposed granite and blanket bog and the 729-metre peaks of the Twelve Bens mountain range, crossed by a single-track road (the Sky Road above Clifden) that provides, on a clear day, one of the most dramatic coastal views in Europe. Connemara has been the landscape of Irish romantic nationalism since the 19th century — it is the landscape that gave Ireland its most potent images of the pre-Famine rural world — and it retains today a quality of emptiness and scale that the more pastoral landscapes of the east cannot offer. The Connemara National Park, centred on the Twelve Bens, has the Diamond Hill walk (a circular route of approximately 8 kilometres that climbs to 445 metres and provides views over the bog and the loughs and the Atlantic coast) that is the most accessible and most rewarding hill walk available from Galway without serious mountaineering equipment. The Connemara ponies — the breed specific to this landscape, hardy, sure-footed, grey or dun in colour, bred for the terrain of the west — are visible in the fields throughout the region and are the most specifically Connemara presence in a landscape that does not lack for atmosphere. Clifden, the market town 80 kilometres west of Galway, is the base for the Sky Road and the most western point of the day trip, its position above the bay and the surrounding mountains making it one of the most photographed small towns in Ireland. The drive from Galway to Clifden through the Connemara National Park and back on the Coastal Route via Roundstone is the full-day drive that most people who have done it name as one of the most beautiful drives they have taken in the British Isles.

Galway Oysters, Soda Bread, and What the Atlantic Provides

The Galway Bay oyster is the finest flat oyster (Ostrea edulis, the native European flat oyster rather than the Pacific rock oyster that now dominates most oyster production) available in Ireland and arguably in Europe — a designation it has held with some consistency since the wild oyster beds of Galway Bay were first commercially harvested in the 18th century and that it maintains through a combination of the specific salinity and temperature of the bay, the plankton richness of the Atlantic waters, and the slow growth of the native flat oyster (two to five years to reach market size, compared to two years for the Pacific oyster) that produces the complexity of flavour that separates a great oyster from a merely good one. The Galway International Oyster Festival in September (established 1954, the oldest oyster festival in the world) is the occasion when the city’s relationship with its most celebrated ingredient is most publicly expressed, but the oysters are available year-round at the restaurants and oyster bars of the city — Moran’s Oyster Cottage at The Weir in Clarinbridge, the closest to the source — and eating a dozen Galway Bay flats with a glass of Guinness on the Spanish Arch waterfront in September is the most specifically Galway food experience available at any price point. The brown soda bread of the west of Ireland — made from wholemeal flour, buttermilk, bread soda, and salt, baked in a tin or on a griddle in the traditional manner, dark and slightly dense with a crust that is the best argument for butter’s existence — is the other specific food of the region, and the version made by Galway’s traditional bakeries from the buttermilk of the surrounding dairy farms is significantly better than the commodity versions available in Irish supermarkets. Eat it warm. Eat it with the salted butter. Eat it with an oyster or eat it alone. Either way, it is the bread of the Atlantic edge and it tastes exactly like what it is.

Galway is the city that most clearly demonstrates what the west of Ireland is — not the tourist brochure version with the thatched cottage and the harp music, but the actual west: the Atlantic light that changes every twenty minutes, the traditional music that starts when it starts and stops when it stops, the oysters from a bay whose water is cold enough to make them extraordinary, the bog and mountain landscape that begins where the city ends. It is two hours from Dublin and a different country in almost every way that matters culturally and geographically and meteorologically. The rain is real. The music is better. The oysters are the finest on the island. Come in September when the Oyster Festival is on and the light is at its most golden and the Connemara mountains are clear. Come in July for the Arts Festival and the Fleadh. Come in any month except possibly February when the Atlantic makes its displeasure with the concept of tourism clearly felt. The city will be there, at the edge of the bay, conducting its business in the way it has since the Lynches built their walls in the 14th century and the merchants from Spain brought their wine into the port that is still there, behind the arch that still carries their name.