Qualla: Fota Island

Fota Island: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name is the giveaway. Fota comes from the Irish 'Fod te,' meaning warm soil - and in the 1840s a Cork landowner called John Smith-Barry realised what that warm soil could do. His family had inherited an island in Cork Harbour sheltered from the harshest Atlantic weather, with deep, well-drained ground. Plant hunters were just then returning from the Pacific Northwest, the Himalayas, the mountains of Chile, with specimens nobody in Western Europe had ever seen. Smith-Barry decided to grow them at Fota. The result is one of the great arboretums of these islands, surrounding a Regency mansion of seventy rooms, on an island that has somehow also become a 100-acre zoo full of giraffes.

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Fota Island: An Island with an Uncertain Name

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 19th-century Ordnance Survey of Ireland settled on 'Foaty' as the spelling. The locals settled on 'Fota.' Both are still in legal use - Foaty is the statutory form. The origin of the name is contested. Some scholars trace it to Hiberno-Norse - Old Norse 'oy' meaning island, a...

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Fota Island: Fota House

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Smith-Barry family built the current house in the early 19th century as a Regency mansion of over seventy rooms. Dorothy Bell, daughter of Arthur Smith-Barry, 1st Baron Barrymore, was the last family member to live there - she died in 1975, and the estate was sold to Universi...

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Fota Island: An Arboretum Built on Warm Soil

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Fota arboretum was John Smith-Barry's project from the 1840s, and his successors continued it through the 19th and 20th centuries. Plants arrived from the great plant-hunting expeditions of the Victorian era - specimens from Asia, South America, the Pacific coast of northwest...

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Fota Island: A Zoo Without Cages

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1979, when Dublin Zoo reached the limit of what it could do on its existing site, the director proposed creating a wildlife park instead. The Zoological Society of Ireland accepted. University College, Cork - which had just acquired Fota - offered the land free under a licence...

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Fota Island: Golf, Tigers, and a Bridge to Great Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 780-acre Fota Island Resort, originally the Smith-Barry demesne, now contains three par-71-or-better championship golf courses called Deerpark, Belvelly and Barryscourt - golf has been played on the island since 1886. The course was redeveloped in 1993 by the Irish Ryder Cup ...

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