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Belfast is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, on the River Lagan where it meets Belfast Lough. It is best known as the city that built the Titanic, remembered at Titanic Belfast and the Harland & Wolff cranes Samson and Goliath, and for Belfast City Hall, the Botanic Gardens and Belfast Castle on Cave Hill.
Chartered as an English settlement in 1613, the town grew with an influx of Scottish Presbyterians and later with industry. When it was 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.
The city had a population of 345,418 in 2021 and 704,406 in its wider metropolitan area, making it the second-largest city on the island of Ireland after Dublin. It is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont and the main port of Northern Ireland.
Belfast City Hall on Donegall Square was built of Portland stone in the Baroque Revival style to designs by Alfred Brumwell Thomas and opened on 1 August 1906. King George V opened the first Parliament of Northern Ireland here on 22 June 1921, and the building is Grade A listed.
The Albert Memorial Clock on Queen's Square in Belfast is a 113-foot clock tower designed by W. J. Barre and completed in 1869 as a memorial to Prince Albert. Built on wooden piles on marshy, reclaimed land beside the River Farset, its top leans four feet off the perpendicular.
St Anne's Cathedral on Donegall Street is a Romanesque-style Anglican cathedral and the focal point of Belfast's Cathedral Quarter. Its foundation stone was laid in 1899 to a design by Sir Thomas Drew, its nave was consecrated in 1904, and it unusually serves two separate dioceses.
The Crown Liquor Saloon on Great Victoria Street in Belfast is a pub refurbished in 1885 and an outstanding example of a Victorian gin palace, with tiles, stained glass and woodwork by Italian craftsmen. The National Trust has owned it since 1978, and it is a Grade A listed building.
Titanic Belfast is a visitor attraction in the city's Titanic Quarter, opened in 2012 on the site of the Harland & Wolff shipyard where the Titanic was built. Its galleries tell the stories of the Titanic, which sank on her maiden voyage in 1912, and her sisters Olympic and Britannic.
SS Nomadic is a White Star Line tender launched in Belfast on 25 April 1911 to ferry passengers at Cherbourg to the liners Olympic and Titanic. Now on show in the Titanic Quarter, she is the last White Star Line vessel and the only surviving ship designed by Thomas Andrews.
Samson and Goliath are the twin gantry cranes of the Harland & Wolff shipyard on Queen's Island in Belfast, built by the German firm Krupp. Goliath, erected in 1969, stands 96 m tall and Samson, from 1974, 106 m, and each can lift up to 840 tonnes across a span of 140 m.
St George's Market on May Street, near the River Lagan, is Belfast's last surviving Victorian covered market, built in red brick with sandstone dressings in three phases between 1890 and 1896. Today it is a thriving market with about 300 traders, crafters, musicians and food vendors.
The Ulster Museum in Belfast's Botanic Gardens is the largest museum in Northern Ireland, with around 8,000 m² of public displays. Founded as the Belfast Natural History Society in 1821, it shows fine and applied art, archaeology, local history, natural sciences and Spanish Armada treasures.
The Botanic Gardens in south Belfast opened in 1828 and cover 28 acres. Their Palm House, built from 1839 to 1840 by the ironmaster Richard Turner with a dome added in 1852, is one of the earliest curvilinear cast iron glasshouses in the world, and the Tropical Ravine dates from 1889.
Belfast Castle is a Victorian mansion built from 1867 to 1870 on the slopes of Cave Hill, now set in Cave Hill Country Park on the north side of Belfast. Standing about 120 m above sea level, it has unobstructed views over the city and Belfast Lough, and it is a Grade A listed building.
Parliament Buildings, known as Stormont after the Stormont Estate in east Belfast, is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Designed by Arnold Thornely in the neoclassical style and built of ashlar stone, it was opened by Edward, Prince of Wales, on 16 November 1932.
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