Dublin Tours

When you get to our fair city you are likely to want to first start out looking at the various Dublin tours that are available. Although Dublin is fairly compact as far as cities go, guided tours are generally the best and easiest way to see the city.

This is because Dublin, being more than a thousand years old, was not a planned city. It grew up organically over the last thousand years which means it has higgeldy piggeldy, curved, narrow and often cobbled streets. This does add to the city's charm most certainly but it also means it can be a bit of a nightmare finding your way around. American cities often utilise the grid system. They have very user friendly street names like 1st street, 3rd promenade and 5th avenue. If you need to be at 4th street and you have just walked past 1st and 2nd street, you know that there is a very good chance that you are almost at your destination when you are in a grid city. In Dublin, you might be walking along a street called College Green, then 3 minutes later that same street changes name to Dame Street, then less than three minutes later the street name has changed again! Now you are on Lord Edward Street, three name changes all in the space of less than ten minutes. It can certainly get confusing in Dublin.

This is the reason that the vast majority of visitors to Dublin choose guided tours as the easiest, most reliable way to see the entire city. Dublin tours are varied, you can choose walking tours of Dublin, which are tours of the city entirely on foot or you can choose bus tours such as the hop on hop off services. They each have their own merits as far as tours go. Walking tours are wonderful as they will take you into the little nooks and crannies of Dublin that Dublin tours by bus can never reach. They will also be able to show you the pedestrian areas of the city, like Grafton Street, Henry Street and Temple Bar which are of course off limits to buses and other vehicles.

Dublin tours by bus however have their own merits. For example, starting from the main street of Dublin, O'Connell Street, it would take about an hour to walk to Kilmainham Gaol, and around 45 minutes to walk to the Guinness Storehouse, the two most visited tour attractions in Dublin. If you wanted to go to see Oscar Wilde's House on Merrion Square, it would be another forty minutes in the opposite direction from Kilmainham Gaol and Guinness. Tours by foot would take all day, over several days, to show you everything there is to see in the city. Tours by bus on the other hand can show you absolutely everything in the city, with a live commentary on all the interesting sites you are seeing in just an hour and a half. On top of this, you get 2 days with your ticket to hop on and hop off the bus, so you could do the whole circuit of the city once, and then use the tour bus as your transport in the city for getting around. Very handy!

As you can see, there are many reasons to choose guided tours over self guided tours, now all you have to do is figure out whether you want to do your Dublin tours on foot or by bus!