GalwayTravel Guide

One strong option for a third day runs south towards Gort, about forty minutes by road, and it is specifically a summer proposition.

Scale: everything below sits within roughly twenty minutes' walk of Eyre Square.

Where the lanes meet the river stands the Spanish Arch, a remnant of the sixteenth-century city walls, with the Galway City Museum beside it.

With two extra days, split them city and county.

Free, modern, and the fastest route into the city's story — from the medieval Anglo-Norman merchant families to the Claddagh fishing village and the Irish revolutionary period.

The Galway Market sets up in Church Lane beside St Nicholas' Collegiate Church, on a charter granted in the fourteenth century.

If you have a car and one free afternoon, spend it on oysters outside the city.

Three days, done properly, look like this.

Shop Street, Quay Street and the lanes off them hold the buskers, the trad pubs and most of the restaurants you have read about.

Across the Corrib, around Dominick Street and Sea Road, is Galway's less obvious quarter: better-value cooking, independent shops, and The Crane Bar, the city's most respected session pub.

The seaside suburb, a couple of kilometres west along the promenade.

The quays east of the Spanish Arch have picked up hotels in recent years, including a large one between the docks and Eyre Square.