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Cork people will tell you, with only slight irony, that their city is actually the real capital of Ireland -- Dublin is merely the largest. The 'Rebel County' earned its name from supporting the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck in 1491 and later from its fierce resistance during the Irish War of Independence, when the British burned much of the city center in December 1920. Cork rebuilt and carries the memory. The English Market, a covered food market on the Grand Parade trading since 1788, is the physical heart of the city's identity: here you find tripe and drisheen (blood sausage), local farmhouse cheeses, West Cork smoked fish, and the best coffee in Munster, all under a Victorian roof that Queen Elizabeth II visited in 2011.

The city is built on an island between two channels of the River Lee, and the medieval street plan of Oliver Plunkett Street, Patrick Street, and the lanes around Shandon gives Cork its particular density.

Saint Anne's Church on John Redmond Street is known as 'four-faced liar' because each face of its salmon-shaped weather vane shows a different time, and visitors can climb the tower and ring the famous Shandon Bells for a small fee -- one of the more satisfying tourist activities in any Irish city. University College Cork, founded in 1845, occupies a Gothic Revival campus just south of the river that looks exactly as a 19th-century Irish university should look.