Spike Island Tours

explore fortress spike.

In the last 1,300 years Spike Island has been host to a 7th century Monastery, a 24 acre Fortress, the largest Victorian convict depot in the world and centuries of island homes.  The island's rich history has included monks and monasteries, rioters and redcoats, captains and convicts and sinners and saints. 

Today the island is dominated by the 200 year old Fort Mitchel, the star shaped Fortress which became a prison holding over 2,300 prisoners.  It was the largest prison in the world at the time and there has never been a larger prison in Ireland or Britain before or since. 

It is this vivid combination of a penal history to rival Alcatraz and a long political history to match Robben Island (there is evidence that Cromwell’s troops held Royalist prisoners on Spike as early as the 1650s) that have made Spike Island a popular visitor attraction since it opened in the summer of 2016. It was voted ‘Europe’s Leading Tourist Attraction” at the World Travel awards in 2017.

Spike Island tours operate within a 5 minute walk of West Beach House.