Belfast Travel Guide

Maine · United States

About Belfast

Belfast ( BEL-fast, , -⁠fahst; from Irish: Béal Feirste [bʲeːlˠ ˈfʲɛɾˠ(ə)ʃtʲə]) is the capital, largest city and main port of Northern Ireland. It stands on the banks of the river Lagan, and is connected to the open sea through Belfast Lough and the North Channel. The city is the most populous in Northern Ireland and the second-largest, after Dublin, on the island of Ireland, with a recorded population in 2021 of 345,418 and of 704,406 for the greater metropolitan area. While chartered as an English settlement in 1613, the town's early growth was driven by an influx of Scottish Presbyterians. Their descendants' disaffection with Ireland's Anglican establishment contributed to the rebellion of 1798 and to the 1801 union with Great Britain that followed. Access to British capital and markets were keys to industrial growth. When granted city status in 1888, Belfast was the world's largest centre of linen manufacture, and by the 1900s its shipyards were building up to a quarter of all United Kingdom tonnage. New industry, which drew large numbers of Catholics from rural districts, was accompanied by growing sectarian tensions in what had been a largely Protestant town. Heightened by division over Ireland's future in the United Kingdom, these twice erupted in periods of sustained violence involving paramilitaries and security forces: in 1920–22, as Belfast became the capital of the six north-eastern counties retaining the British connection, and in the so-called Troubles, the three decades from the late 1960s during which the British Army was continually deployed on the streets. A legacy of conflict is the barrier-reinforced separation of Protestant and Catholic working-class districts.