Galway City Museum is free, it’s three floors, and it sits right behind the Spanish Arch on the banks of the Corrib – which makes it the obvious move when the Atlantic weather turns and you want something to do in the centre of town. You walk into the courtyard through the Arch itself, past some of the best-surviving stretches of Galway’s medieval town wall, and the building takes maybe an hour and a half to see properly. It was Lonely Planet’s pick as the top attraction in the city, and it pulls over 200,000 visitors a year.
If you see one thing, make it the Galway hooker. The museum has a full-size example of the city’s distinctive red-sailed wooden sailing boat, the Máirtín Oliver, built specially for it, shown alongside the boat-building tools of John Reney – it’s the rare exhibit you can stand under and grasp the scale of. After that, the things worth seeking out are the small, specific objects: the Civic Sword that dates to Galway’s charter from King James I in 1610, the Great Mace of ornamental silver made in Dublin in 1710, and, from the other end of the timeline, a stone axe-head carbon-dated to around 3500 BC.
What’s inside
The three floors run thematically from prehistory through the medieval walled town to the 20th century. Current exhibitions include Surrounded by Stone, on the region’s carved stone monuments; Keepers of the Gael (Caomhnóirí na nGael); Revolution in Galway, 1913–23, on the War of Independence and Civil War; The Galway Hooker; The Claddagh, on the old fishing village across the river; SUPERHUMAN; and Wild Atlantic – Sea Science, on the marine life off the coast. The bronze statue of the writer Pádraic Ó Conaire, long a fixture of Eyre Square, also lives here now.
It’s a compact museum rather than a grand national one – an hour or two, not a day – and that’s part of its appeal: what it lacks in scale it makes up for in being free, central and genuinely well put together. It holds Full Accreditation under the Heritage Council’s Museum Standards Programme, for what that’s worth as a quality signal.
The building
The current building opened in April 2007, replacing the original museum next door in Comerford House. Designed by Ciarán O’Connor and Ger Harvey, it was deliberately kept low and modest so as not to overpower the medieval walls beside it, and won a Bank of Ireland Opus architectural award. Big windows frame the river, and there’s a top-floor viewing terrace looking out over the Corrib, the Claddagh and Galway Bay – worth the climb on a clear day.
The museum traces its origins to 1976, growing out of a residual collection of medieval stones from the city. Those stones had belonged to the artist Clare Sheridan, the previous occupant of Comerford House (she had died in 1970), and the collection housed there became the nucleus of the museum that opened after.
Planning your visit
Entry is free, with donations welcome. The museum opens Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5pm and, in summer (from Easter Sunday), Sunday 12pm–5pm; it’s closed Mondays, and the galleries close at 4.45pm. Allow one to two hours. It gets busiest during school holidays and the summer festivals, so a weekday morning is the quietest time.
There’s a café on site, and a virtual tour online with 360-degree views of the galleries if you want a preview. For access, manual wheelchairs can be pre-booked free by emailing museum@galwaycity.ie or calling 091 532460; there are two disabled-parking spaces on the Long Walk side, accessible toilets, lifts to all floors and seating throughout. General parking is limited – there’s pay-and-display on Spanish Parade and nearby streets with short time limits, so a city-centre car park and a short walk is usually easier.
The museum sits at the heart of old Galway: the Spanish Arch is at the door, the Long Walk promenade and the Claddagh are a couple of minutes away, and Shop Street, St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church and Eyre Square are all within a short stroll. Treat it as the start of a wander rather than a destination in itself.