Nine miles out into the Atlantic, the twin peaks of Skellig Michael break the horizon like a stone tooth. A Gaelic Christian monastery clung to the higher of those peaks for six hundred years, beginning around the 7th century, in a cluster of corbelled beehive huts perched on terraces above sheer cliffs. The monks left in the 12th century. The site was largely untouched until UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1996, after which the world began to pay attention. From Portmagee, small licensed boats run out to the island in the summer months when the sea permits, a service that today doubles as the pilgrimage of choice for fans of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, both of which used the rock as the hideaway of Luke Skywalker. The boats sail past Illaunloughan in the channel, then turn west into the open swell.

On the night of 31 December every year, Portmagee performs a folk drama that has been kept up since 1727. The story behind it begins with a French ship from Nantes, blown into the harbour during a storm three days after Christmas. A few nights later, the villagers heard a strange screech rising from the end of the pier and assumed a banshee had come for someone. What they found, when they crept down to look, was the French crew carrying torches in a procession, with an old, ragged man tottering in the middle and falling three times along the way. At midnight a shot rang out, the old man fell for the last time, and a younger man dressed in white and a top hat leapt out of the dark. The old man was the year that had just ended; the new man was the one starting. The crew shook hands and kissed the villagers and the music played louder. Every New Year's Eve since, Portmagee has done it again.

Just south of the village rise the Kerry Cliffs, a sweep of dark rock standing nearly two hundred metres above the Atlantic. They look across to Skellig Michael in clear weather and back along the south coast of Valentia Island in any weather. The cliffs are easier to reach than the more famous Cliffs of Moher and, on a quiet morning, considerably less crowded. The view rewards the short walk from the village. North of the channel, the small island of Illaunloughan holds the remains of another, much smaller monastery, an 8th-century way-station that pilgrims may once have used before heading out to the Skelligs proper.

For all the boat traffic in summer, Portmagee remains a working fishing village. Skellig Rangers, the local GAA team, was founded in 1895 as Portmagee G.A.A. and plays at Pairc Chill Imeallach. The colourful row of houses along the harbour, the same row that appears on a hundred postcards and tourism posters, is older than it looks; some of the houses date to the smuggling era, though the bright paint is more recent. In 2012 the Irish Times awarded Portmagee the state's first tourism town award, a recognition the village has worked to deserve without losing the working pier that gave it a reason to exist in the first place.