Behind the buskers, Galway is a walled Norman colony run for 300 years by fourteen merchant families. This route follows the physical evidence: an excavated 13th-century hall, wall towers inside a shopping centre, and the Famine shoreline.
Three floors tracing Galway from Bronze Age dugout canoes to the 1916 Rising, built around a surviving section of the medieval city wall. Free entry, Tue–Sat 10:00–17:00, Sun 12:00–17:00. The Claddagh gallery holds original hooker sails.
Excavated in 1997 under Druid Lane, this 13th-century hall of Richard de Burgo served as Galway's Norman courthouse and customs house. A glass-roofed free site displaying finds from 11,000 objects: coins, pilgrim badges, a Nuremberg jeton.
Ireland's largest medieval parish church still in weekly use, founded in 1320 and dedicated to the patron saint of sailors. Columbus reputedly prayed here in 1477. Cromwellian troops stabled horses inside; hack marks still scar the stonework.
Two 15th-century towers of the town wall stand roofed inside a shopping centre, with the Great Gate arch beside them. This is the only stretch of Galway's 1270s defences you can walk through at close quarters, free during mall hours.
The two-room cottage on Bowling Green where James Joyce's Nora grew up, billed as Ireland's smallest museum. Letters, photographs and furniture from the 1909 visits Joyce made to Galway, all inside about 30 square metres of floor space.
A 1627 merchant house facade, re-erected in stone, anchors the square where John F. Kennedy spoke in June 1963, ten weeks before Dallas. The Quincentennial Fountain's rust-red steel sheets echo the sails of Galway hookers.
Ivy-swallowed shell of the Blake family's 1569 tower house on the east bank of the Corrib, gutted by fire in 1910 with a daughter of the household lost inside. Reached along the Dyke Road riverside path north of the city.
A Grattan Road park named for a six-year-old from Connemara who starved in Galway in 1847 after walking here for food. The limestone memorial faces the bay from which coffin ships sailed for Boston and Quebec. Open at all hours.
The O'Flaherty stronghold of around 1500, six storeys standing on limestone riddled with caves — the banqueting hall floor collapsed into the river below. A restored bastion and double bawn survive. Twenty-five minutes out the N59.
Site of the thatched fishing village that stood outside the walls, Irish-speaking and self-governing under its own elected 'King' until slum clearance in the 1930s replaced every cabin with concrete cottages. The quay wall survives.
Trading since 1750 and the original maker of the Claddagh ring, with a free back-room museum of hallmark punches and the oldest surviving Galway-made rings, including pieces bearing the mark of Richard Joyce, the ring's reputed creator.
Galway's Victorian burial ground, opened in 1880, holding the grave of Irish-language writer Pádraic Ó Conaire, Republican plots from the Civil War years, and headstones for families displaced from the Claddagh cabins.