Ireland Guide
Galway and Mayo
Galway City Museum
Address: Down by the river, near the sixteenth-century Spanish Arch
Website: www.galwaycitymuseum.ie
Telephone: 091/532460
Opening time: June– Sept daily 10am–5pm; Oct– May Tues– Sat 10am–5pm
Price: Free
The swanky, new, glass-fronted Galway City Museum currently exhibits relatively few artefacts (though more are planned as the museum finds its feet), but traces the city's history in vivid fashion, dealing with The Claddagh on the second floor, the medieval town on the first, and bringing matters up to date on the ground floor. The highlights are a nine-metre hooker, a traditional sailing boat suspended in all its glory in the atrium that was specially commissioned for the museum; and a statue of Galway-born Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882–1928), the first modernist fiction writer in Irish. The museum also hosts some interesting temporary exhibitions, as well as a regular series of poetry readings at Friday lunchtimes. From the museum, you can take a short, pleasant stroll either down to the river mouth for views across the bay to the Burren hills, or upstream along a quiet path that passes weirs, fishermen and a few patches of lawn.