The story starts on a small island in Lough Leane, the lake whose northeastern shore Killarney perches on. In 640 AD, St. Finian the Leper founded a monastery on Innisfallen - Faithlinn's island, in Irish - and the monks held it for roughly 850 years. According to tradition, the Irish High King Brian Boru, the man who would later break Viking power at Clontarf, received his education in those walls. The Annals of Innisfallen, one of the great chronicles of medieval Ireland, were written on this island, recording weather and warfare and the deaths of kings century after century. Elizabeth I finally dispossessed the monks in 1594, and the abbey crumbled into the ivy-wrapped ruin visitors row out to see today. Above the modern town, on a hill called Aghadoe, 7th-century ogham stones mark another ancient holy site, layered over what may have begun as a pagan one.

Lord Kenmare's tourism experiment got its biggest endorsement in 1861, when Queen Victoria visited and the world's most powerful empire suddenly had a Killarney fixation. The railway had arrived in July 1853, transforming what had been a difficult trip into something a Victorian family could manage with hatboxes and hampers. Within a year, the three hotels Isaac Slater had counted in 1846 had multiplied to seven, scattered along the lake shores - the Railway Hotel by the station, the Victoria a mile west on the Lower Lake, the Torc perched on its elevated site above the Lake Hotel. By 1858, journalist Samuel Carter Hall was marvelling at the 110-mile Ring of Kerry tour, and at the mountain-bred horses who thought nothing of fifty miles in a day. The infrastructure of mass tourism - the carriages, the inns, the guided routes - was being built in real time.

Between 1919 and 1923, Killarney's lakes and forests hid more than tourists. The Irish War of Independence and the Civil War that followed reached even this scenic corner. The Headford Ambush, in which the IRA attacked a railway train a few kilometres from town, was one notable engagement. Worse came after the truce. A day after the Ballyseedy massacre - in which Free State forces killed Republican prisoners by tying them to a landmine - five more Republican prisoners were killed in Killarney by Free State troops. A memorial in town honours those who died in the War of Independence. The tourist economy revived afterwards, but the names on that monument are part of Killarney too, alongside the boatmen and jaunting-car drivers.

What people actually come to see is the landscape. Three lakes - Lough Leane, Muckross, and the Upper Lake - chain together south of town, ringed by mountains. MacGillycuddy's Reeks rise to the west, Ireland's highest range, with Carrauntoohil topping out at 1,038 metres. The Gap of Dunloe knifes through the hills, a glacial pass so narrow that for centuries traffic moved through it in single file on pony or foot. Torc Waterfall tumbles 20 metres down a moss-blackened cliff in Killarney National Park. The Paps of Anu - two perfectly conical peaks named for an Irish mother goddess - rise to the east. The light here changes constantly: rain coming in over the Reeks, sun breaking on Innisfallen, mist rising off Muckross Lake at dawn. Van Morrison wasn't exaggerating about the blue.

Killarney isn't a museum. Liebherr Cranes has built container cranes here since 1958, and a street is named for the founder, Hans Liebherr. Kerry's All-Ireland-winning footballers play at Fitzgerald Stadium, which holds 43,180 spectators when Kerry meets Dublin. The Killarney Regatta - Ireland's oldest surviving regatta - is rowed on the lake every July in wide wooden six-person boats. In 2023, Killarney became the first town in Ireland to ban single-use coffee cups, a small revolt against the tourism that built it. The actor Michael Fassbender grew up here. So did the singer Jessie Buckley. The American musician Mark Lanegan, of Screaming Trees, chose to spend the last two years of his life here, dying in 2022. Killarney is the kind of place people come from, and the kind of place people decide to stop.