Bantry sits where the long deep-water gulf of Bantry Bay reaches its inland end, 30 kilometres west of the open Atlantic, with the Beara Peninsula to the northwest and the Sheep's Head Peninsula to the southwest. The town's focus is the broad square, partly built on infilled harbour shallows, that once hosted cattle fairs and now holds a weekly market and the occasional public event. Two piers protect what remains of the inner harbour, where a 40-berth marina opened in 2017. The Irish lore around Saint Breandan the Navigator - who in tradition was the first person to reach America - claims an ancient connection here, as it does at several other points along the southwest coast. A 15th-century Franciscan friary stood west of town; nothing of it remains beyond a graveyard. Saint Cannera, who lived as a hermit in the area in the sixth century, is associated with the parish.

Between 21 and 27 December 1796, 17 ships of the planned French invasion of Ireland anchored in Bantry Bay. The Expedition d'Irlande, organized at the urging of Theobald Wolfe Tone, was meant to land 15,000 troops under General Hoche to spark a rising against British rule. Storms had scattered the fleet on the crossing. The flagship was missing. Easterly gales kept any landing impossible. After days of waiting, the fleet sailed away, having achieved nothing. One of its ships, the frigate Surveillante, was scuttled in the bay rather than risk drifting onto the rocks. Her wreck would not be found again until 1979. Richard White, a local landowner who had organized local defences against the threatened invasion, was rewarded by a grateful British administration: Baron Bantry in 1797, Viscount in 1800, Earl in 1816. The Bantry House demesne on the outskirts of town, in the family since 1739, testifies to what loyalty to the Crown could buy a Cork landowner.

For centuries, Bantry was a base for major pilchard fisheries, with boats arriving from Spain, France, and the Netherlands to fish the bay. The pilchard ruins on Whiddy Island date from that era. Tourism took over in the nineteenth century as a major economic engine. Then in the late 1960s, Gulf Oil built the supertanker terminal on Whiddy. At its height the facility was one of West Cork's largest employers. On 8 January 1979, the tanker Betelgeuse exploded at the jetty during unloading, killing all 42 crew and seven terminal workers. Bantry's fishing community lost income; 250 terminal workers lost their jobs. The town began mussel-farming in the sheltered waters between the harbour and Whiddy - the lines of buoys you see from the pier today. The terminal has passed through Tosco, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, Zenith Energy, and most recently Sunoco, which acquired it in 2024. It still holds about a third of Ireland's strategic petroleum reserve.

On 23 June 1985, Air India Flight 182 exploded above the Atlantic en route from Montreal to London. The plane came down off the West Cork coast. All 329 people aboard were killed - the worst aviation terrorist attack before September 2001. Bantry, the nearest substantial town to the search area, became a focal point for arriving families. Local residents took relatives into their homes, fed them, drove them to identification facilities and to the cliffs at Ahakista where they could look out toward the sea where their loved ones had died. The compassion shown by the people of West Cork was specifically and warmly acknowledged. The Canadian government later presented Bantry with a commemorative plaque in recognition. It hangs in the town now, a small bronze thing on a wall, that says something quiet about what an Irish coastal town can do for strangers in the worst hours of their lives.

Bantry hosts the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and the West Cork Literary Festival each summer, both drawing performers and writers of international stature to a town of fewer than 3,000 people. Notable Bantry-born figures include Tim Healy, the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State; William Martin Murphy, the businessman whose name became synonymous with the 1913 Dublin lock-out; Francis O'Neill, the Chicago police superintendent and collector of Irish traditional music; and Derry O'Sullivan, the Paris-based Irish-language poet who died in 2025 and wrote often about his native town. More recently, brothers Fineen and Josh Wycherley have played professional rugby for Munster. The economy now runs on tourism, mussel-farming, small-scale pharmaceuticals and food production, and the slow steady commerce of being the service town for two peninsulas. Bantry is twinned with La Crosse, Wisconsin, and with Pont-l'Abbe in Brittany - a Breton link that fits the town's long Atlantic conversation.