Phoenix Park
Wild deer have grazed here since the 1660s — inside a walled royal hunting ground that only opened to Dubliners in 1745.
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Built in 1662 by the Duke of Ormond as a 2,000-acre hunting park, it covers 707 hectares enclosed by an 11-kilometre perimeter wall. The fallow deer herd that arrived with the original hunting stock still roams freely. The Irish Government is lobbying UNESCO for World Heritage designation.
What to look for
- Wild fallow deer, resident since the 17th century, grazing freely across the open grassland
- The Magazine Fort (1734), built on the site of the demolished Phoenix House — the manor that gave the park its name
- The Phoenix Column, relocated during Decimus Burton's 19th-century redesign of the park's paths and plantings
2–4 km west of Dublin city centre, north of the River Liffey.
Phoenix Park is one of 35 sights worth the detour in Dublin, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Dublin pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Dublin
- Aviva StadiumOne 51,711-seat bowl jointly owned by rugby and football — two governing bodies, one ground, no separate home for either.
- Dublin CastleThe river that gave Dublin its name still flows beneath your feet — and the building above it ran Ireland for 750 years.
- Croke ParkThe fourth-largest stadium in Europe holds 82,300 people — almost entirely for sports most of the world has never watched.
- National Library of IrelandIreland's paper memory — manuscripts, photographs, and newspapers free to open on the spot.
- St Patrick's CathedralIreland's national cathedral has never had a bishop — that role belongs to the rival church 400 metres up the road.
- Spire of DublinA 120-metre stainless-steel pin planted on the exact spot where an IRA bomb in 1966 — and a controlled demolition six days later — erased Nelson's Pillar.