Killarney

Sister cities

• Cooper City
• Myrtle Beach
• Castiglione di Sicilia
• Pleinfeld

History

Killarney featured prominently in early Irish history, with religious settlements playing an important part of its recorded history. Its first significantly historical settlement was the monastery on nearby Innisfallen Island founded in 640 by St. Finian the Leper, which was occupied for approximately 850 years. It operated until the monks were dispossessed in 1594 by Elizabeth I, Queen of England. According to tradition, the Irish High King Brian Boru received his education at Innisfallen. The island's monastic ruins were later refurbished by the Kenmare estate as a dining place for visitors, part of a broader effort by the town's landlords to open the area up to tourism. Aghadoe, the local townland which overlooks present day Killarney, may have begun as a pagan religious site. The site has also been associated with the 5th century missionary St. Abban, but 7th century ogham stones mark the first clear evidence of Aghadoe being used as an important site. According to legend, St. Finian founded a monastery at Aghadoe in the 6th or 7th century. The first written record of a monastery dates from 939 AD in the Annals of Innisfallen where the Aghadoe monastery is referred to as the "Old Abbey." Muckross Abbey was founded in 1448 as a Franciscan friary for the Observantine Franciscans by Donal McCarthy Mor. The abbey was burned down by Cromwellian forces under General Ludlow in 1654, and today remains a ruin. By the 18th century, the friary's cloister, with its enormous yew tree, had become one of the district's most visited ruins, though the quantity of disinterred human bone left underfoot there drew repeated complaints from travel writers until the Herbert family eventually had the site cleared. }} Killarney's tourism history goes back at least to the mid 18th…