Galway in 2 days, on foot

This 2-day self-guided walking plan for Galway covers 13 narrated sights in an easy day-by-day order. Each day is split into a morning and an afternoon loop, and every stop has a two to three minute audio story in the Gingerguide app.

You set the pace: this is a suggested order, not a schedule. Walk it in 2 days, or stretch it out. Reorder freely; Galway rewards a detour.

The Galway route at a glance

Day 1

Day 1 covers 7 stops over about 3.4 km as the crow flies, from Salthill Promenade to The Spanish Arch and the Long Walk. ≈ 3.4 km between stops, straight line

Morning

1. Salthill Promenade: Galway's breezy seaside promenade, 'the Prom', a two-kilometre walk along Galway Bay past the Blackrock diving tower, with a tradition of kicking the wall at the far end and long views to the hills of Clare. 2.1 km to the next stop
2. Galway Cathedral: The great domed Catholic cathedral on the River Corrib, built of local limestone on the site of the old city jail and finished in 1965, often called the youngest of Europe's great stone cathedrals. 0.6 km to the next stop
3. Eyre Square: The green heart of Galway, a city-centre park laid out on the old medieval green, with a stone fountain of rust-red sails recalling the Galway hooker, the banners of the Tribes, and a doorway of 1627. 0.3 km to the next stop
4. Collegiate Church of St Nicholas: The largest medieval church still in everyday use in Ireland, founded in 1320 and dedicated to the patron of sailors, where tradition says Columbus prayed, ringed each weekend by the Galway Market. 0.1 km to the next stop

Afternoon

1. Lynch's Castle: The finest medieval merchant townhouse in Ireland, a carved stone tower on Shop Street built by the Lynch family, with gargoyles and the royal arms of Henry VII, now in daily use as a bank. 0.1 km to the next stop
2. The Latin Quarter: The lively medieval heart of Galway, the cobbled pedestrian run of Shop Street and Quay Street, crowded with painted shopfronts, traditional pubs, Claddagh jewellers and the buskers who give the city its music. 0.2 km to the next stop
3. The Spanish Arch and the Long Walk: A surviving fragment of Galway's medieval sea walls of 1584 by the River Corrib, where goods from Spain and France came ashore, beside the colourful quayside houses of the Long Walk and the old Claddagh.

Day 2

Day 2 covers 6 stops over about 130 km as the crow flies, from Galway City Museum to Kylemore Abbey. ≈ 130 km between stops, straight line

Morning

1. Galway City Museum: The city's free museum beside the Spanish Arch, telling Galway's medieval, maritime and modern story, with a traditional Galway hooker hung in its atrium and the treasures of the old Claddagh village. 17 km to the next stop
2. Dunguaire Castle: A picture-perfect 16th-century tower house on a rocky point in Galway Bay at Kinvara, once a gathering place of the Irish literary revival; one of Ireland's most photographed castles, best admired from the shore. 18 km to the next stop
3. The Burren: A vast, silver-grey moonscape of cracked limestone in County Clare where Arctic, Alpine and Mediterranean wildflowers grow side by side, scattered with ancient tombs including the great Poulnabrone dolmen. 21 km to the next stop

Afternoon

1. Cliffs of Moher: Ireland's most famous sea cliffs, a wall of rock rising over 200 metres from the Atlantic on the Clare coast south of Galway, crowned by O'Brien's Tower, alive with seabirds and part of a UNESCO Geopark. 72 km to the next stop
2. Connemara National Park: A wild expanse of mountain, bog and heath in the heart of Connemara, crowned by the cone of Diamond Hill, whose boardwalk trails give grand views over the Twelve Bens, the coast and grazing Connemara ponies. 3.2 km to the next stop
3. Kylemore Abbey: A romantic neo-Gothic castle mirrored in a Connemara lake, built in the 1860s as a grieving husband's memorial, now a Benedictine abbey with a miniature Gothic church and a restored Victorian walled garden.

Distances are straight-line between stops; streets add a little.

Updated: October 10, 2026

Full Galway guide and all stops →