Discover Killarney

The original Irish tourist town

Killarney exists in its modern form because of the lakes. The monks came first, founding Innisfallen Abbey on its island in Lough Leane around the seventh century and keeping the Annals of Inisfallen there for centuries. The Victorians came next, and in numbers: the railway reached the town in 1853, the Lakes of Killarney were already a fixture of the Romantic imagination, and Queen Victoria's visit in 1861 sealed the place as a destination. The jaunting car, the lakeside hotels and the guided boat trips all date from that era, which is why Killarney can feel like a town that was purpose-built to be visited, because in large part it was.

The land behind the town is the real inheritance. In 1932 Senator Arthur Vincent and his parents-in-law, the Bourns, gave the 11,000-acre Muckross estate to the Irish State in memory of Maud Bourn Vincent, and that gift became the core of Killarney National Park, the first national park in Ireland and now a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It holds the country's largest remaining native oak woods, its only wild herd of native red deer, and the three lakes, Lough Leane, Muckross Lake and the Upper Lake, that the whole town is arranged around. Killarney itself is the gateway to the Ring of Kerry and the Reeks, and a working tourism town that has had a century and a half of practice.