Salthill Promenade
Head southwest of the city centre and you’ll soon come to the Salthill Promenade, two kilometres long with a beautiful perspective from the north side of the bay. If you’re fortunate enough to walk the promenade when the skies are clear you’ll see the outline of the Burren down in County Clare, while up in the northwest are the peaks of Connemara.
The land behind the promenade was set aside for farming until the Great Famine in the middle of the 19th century, and was then set up for early tourism in 1860 with the arrival of the Eglinton Hotel, which is still here today. The promenade is lined with bars, seafood restaurants and cafés. You can drop in at the Galway Atlantaquaria, run by the National Aquarium of Ireland, or watch the yacht sails zipping across the water in the summer.