🇮🇪 Ireland
Dublin
Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath in Irish — "Town of the Hurdled Ford") is the capital and largest city of Ireland (population 1.4 million in the greater Dublin area, 60% of the Republic of Ireland's total population concentrated in one metropolitan area). Dublin is a city of extraordinary literary density: it is the setting of James Joyce's Ulysses (the single most important novel of the 20th century, set entirely in Dublin on June 16, 1904 — now celebrated as Bloomsday, when thousands of Dubliners and literary pilgrims recreate Leopold Bloom's walk through the city in Edwardian dress), the birthplace of Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw (four Nobel Prize winners in literature from one small city), and Jonathan Swift (who wrote Gulliver's Travels while Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral). Dublin is also the city that produced Guinness stout (brewed at the St. James's Gate Brewery since 1759, the original lease signed for 9,000 years by Arthur Guinness), the Book of Kells (the most famous illuminated manuscript in the world, created by Irish monks in 800 AD, housed at Trinity College Dublin), and the Temple Bar cultural quarter on the south bank of the Liffey (the most visited pub district in Ireland).