This private Belfast tour is built for first time visitors with only a few hours available, covering the city's landmark sites plus two of its best interior visits.
After meeting your guide, you begin with a driving tour of Belfast, taking in sites such as the Albert Memorial Clock Tower, known locally as the city's leaning tower after subsidence in the reclaimed marshland it was built on in the 1860s gave it a noticeable tilt, and the Grand Opera House, one of Belfast's great Victorian landmarks. You also see City Hall with its Titanic Memorial, the Crown Bar, dating from 1885, and Queens University, one of the most striking buildings in the city. Depending on your interests, you may see the Harland and Wolff Shipyard, where the Titanic was built and launched in 1912, or the Shankill and Falls Road, which give a sense of Belfast's more recent history.
You stop for a visit at St Anne's Cathedral, where the foundation stone was laid in 1899 to a design by Sir Thomas Drew and the nave was consecrated in 1904, though the building was not fully completed until the addition of its spire in 2007. The heavily ornate west front holds three portals, and inside you find a mosaic covered chapel dedicated to St Patrick. The cathedral's only tomb belongs to Edward Carson, the Dublin born barrister and Ulster Unionist leader whose campaign against Home Rule helped keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom, who was laid to rest here in 1935.
Next you visit the Botanic Gardens, which opened to the public in 1828 after the Belfast Botanic and Horticultural Society was founded the year before. The centerpiece is the cast iron and curvilinear glass Palm House, designed by architect Charles Lanyon and built in 1839, home to palms and other hothouse plants. You also see the Tropical Ravine, designed by head gardener Charles McKimm and opened in 1889, a sunken glen filled with tropical plants. At the end of your tour you are brought back to Belfast's pier.