Galway Today
Galway has a strong tourist trade and is a very popular holiday destination with great beaches and numerous arts and music festivals throughout the year. It also has a cosmopolitan feel to it with its winding streets with numerous buskers and street entertainers, it’s a joy to explore with a vibrant café culture and colourful shop fronts. It may seem like a cliché but the people are extremely friendly and just popping in for a quick drink in a pub with a turf fire and musicians playing can turn into a welcome adventure. Galway has a wealth of accommodation ranging from boutique hotels www.theg.ie to more homely B&B’s and hostels. Most pubs have local musicians playing and locals and tourists alike are welcome to join in and share a song or two. Galway is also home to the National University of Ireland at Galway so it truly is a young city. It punches about its weight in cinemas, theatres and arts venues and there is always a host of street entertainment in the main thoroughfare around Shop Street.
Festivals and Events
The Galway Races are like no other race festival in Ireland – old men on their annual outing mingle with the glitterati from Dublin and you might even bump into the President of Ireland www.galwayraces.com . Or you might want to visit when the famous Galway Arts Festival is on which caters for every visual and performing art www.galwayartsfestival.com, or maybe plan your visit to join in The International Galway Oyster Festival which has an global reputation, about 10,000 descend on the city to hear live entertainment, eat gourmet food, eat some oysters and drink some Guinness www.galwayoysterfestival.com . Whatever cultural, literary, musical or gourmet event you are interested in there is an abundance in this bustling and lively city.
Sightseeing from Galway.
Whether you want to drive, cycle or catch a dedicated tour bus there is a wealth of amazing places to see close to Galway. Connemara is a world apart, its landscapes remain unchanged for centuries and you can glimpse cottage ruins from The Potato Famine left as a reminder of the past. Or what about a trip to the world famous Cliffs of Moher or The Burren which has species of plants unseen anywhere else, or perhaps you might want to catch a ferry or a plane over to one of the three Aran Islands? When you get off the ferry you can hire a bike or hop on a horse drawn taxi to discover an amazing place on the edge of the world.
Galway is like nowhere else in Ireland. It is vibrant, diverse, bohemian and culturally inclusive. People you bump into one night will start a conversation with you the next evening, it is small enough to have a small town feel geographically, yet culturally it is Ireland’s melting pot. If you only have two places to go in Ireland make sure one of them is Galway.