Qualla: Garinish Island (County Kerry)

Garinish Island (County Kerry): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Garinish means 'near island' in Irish, which is the kind of name you give a place when you can see it clearly from shore. It lies just off the coast of the Iveragh Peninsula, in the broad mouth of the Kenmare River where the bay opens to the Atlantic. For most of the past 170 years it has been one family's project at a time: a country lord with too much money in the 1850s, his son who turned the garden subtropical, a couple who restored it after the war, and a Swiss banker who has owned it since the 1990s. The island is closed to the public. You see it from the water, which is appropriate. The garden was always for the people who could come by boat.

Garinish Island (County Kerry): An Earl's Holiday Plan

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1855 Edwin Wyndham-Quin, the 3rd Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl, bought Garinish from the Bland family of Derryquin Castle. The earl was 43 years old, in the prime of his Victorian wealth, and what he wanted was a holiday house. He hired the architect James Franklin Fuller, w...

Garinish Island (County Kerry): The Subtropical Experiment

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From 1900 onwards Windham Wyndham-Quin, the 4th Earl, turned Garinish into something more interesting. The Gulf Stream warms the south-west of Ireland enough that exotic plants can survive winters they would not endure further inland or further north. The earl filled the island w...

Garinish Island (County Kerry): The Fire and the Recovery

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In September 1922, during the Irish Civil War, Garinish Lodge burned. Anti-Treaty forces torched dozens of grand houses across Ireland in those months - symbols of the old Anglo-Irish order, easy to justify destroying. The fire took the lodge, but not the garden. When Lord Dunrav...

Garinish Island (County Kerry): The Banker's Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Since the 1990s Garinish has been owned by Jacqui Safra, a Swiss investor descended from the Syrian Jewish banking dynasty that built one of the world's quietest financial fortunes. The Safras came from Aleppo, established banks in Beirut and Brazil and Geneva, and accumulated th...

Garinish Island (County Kerry): From the Water

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is another Garinish - a more famous one - in Bantry Bay, run by the Office of Public Works and open to anyone with a ferry ticket. This is not that island. This Garinish is smaller, more secluded, and visible only from outside its boundary. The contrast is itself interestin...