Croke Park & GAA Museum

Croke Park is the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association and, at a capacity of around 82,300, the largest stadium in Ireland and the third-largest in Europe. It is the home of hurling and Gaelic football, whose All-Ireland finals each summer fill it to capacity. For visitors, the GAA Museum and a behind-the-scenes stadium tour are open year-round on non-match days.

The stadium tour is an access-all-areas walk through the players' tunnel, the dressing rooms and pitch-side, where the scale of the place is best felt from down on the grass. The museum traces the history of the GAA, an organisation woven deeply into Irish identity, nationalism and parish community, and the development of the two national games. The ground is also a site of modern Irish history: on Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920, British forces opened fire on the crowd at a football match, killing 14 — among them the Tipperary player Michael Hogan, after whom the Hogan Stand is named.

The Etihad Skyline tour is a separate, higher tier: a walkway around the stadium roof, 17 storeys up, with panoramic views over the city. Croke Park is on the north side of Dublin, about 25 minutes' walk or a short bus from O'Connell Street. On match days the streets around it are one of the great sporting experiences in Europe — if you can get a ticket to a championship hurling or football game, take it over any tour.