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BEST Wild Atlantic Way 5 Day Private Tour Connemara Cliffs Galway
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From €2910 per person
Five days is a genuinely satisfying way to experience the Wild Atlantic Way. You’ll cover Connemara, the Cliffs of Moher and Galway without feeling hurried, and you’ll have time for the detours and discoveries that make a trip like this memorable. You’re collected from wherever suits you, and from there you travel in a luxury Mercedes - WiFi on board, bottled water provided - with an expert guide who holds official guiding accreditation.
The tour is built around local connection. Your guide will bring you to markets, farms, woolen mills, distilleries and craft centres alongside the big-ticket sights, so you’re getting a real picture of life along the coast. You’ll meet locals who’ll share their own knowledge and passions. Food is taken seriously too - your guide knows where to go and will point you in the right direction each day.
Accommodation for 4 nights in boutique and luxury-style hotels with full breakfasts can be included when booking. 5-star and castle hotels are available on request. If you’d like to tailor the itinerary around particular interests, that can be arranged. Note that admission tickets to individual attractions are not included in the tour price.
Build at least two nights into your Galway stay. Galway is a city that takes an evening to begin making sense and a second evening to repay. The medieval core - Shop Street to Quay Street and left from there at random - is the kind of place where you give up on a plan and follow the sound of music. Tigh Coili and the Crane Bar both run serious trad sessions most nights, and the Gourmet Tart Company opens early if you want a coffee and a hand pie before the car arrives in the morning.
Ask your guide to factor in Salthill Promenade, west of the city. Salthill is what a seaside town looks like with two hundred years to think about it - a flat promenade by the water, the old saltwater pool at the pier end, an ice cream stand that outlasts everything. It is ten minutes from the city centre and the right place to be on a still evening before dinner.
Oughterard is where the road to Connemara starts and it earns a stop. The village sits on the western shore of Lough Corrib, 27km west of Galway, and Aughnanure Castle - an O’Flaherty tower house from around 1500 - stands three kilometres east on the shore. Conn’s pub on Main Street is the angling crowd’s local; the staff know the Owenriff River. It’s a good lunch stop before the N59 opens up toward Clifden.
Clifden needs two nights to do it properly. The Sky Road loops 16km out past Clifden Castle ruins and back along the headland with the Twelve Bens on one side and the Atlantic on the other. Derrygimlagh bog, four kilometres south, has the foundations of Marconi’s first commercial transatlantic wireless station (1907) and the landing site of Alcock and Brown’s first non-stop transatlantic flight (1919) - both on a flat 5km discovery loop. Lowry’s on Market Street has won Ireland’s Best Traditional Bar three times.
The Aran Islands are a real option on a five-day itinerary. The ferry runs from Rossaveal, forty minutes west of Galway, and a day on Inis Mór - stone forts, cliff walks, a pace of life that is its own education - is one of the harder things to forget about a Wild Atlantic Way trip. The boat crossing takes around an hour. The sea decides whether it runs, so don’t book the ferry as your first day. Kilronan is the main village on Inis Mór: Dún Aonghasa, the prehistoric stone fort on the cliff edge, is the walk everyone does; Tigh Ned is the pub at the centre of the village with sessions most nights; Joe Mac’s does fish landed that morning. Bike hire at the pier is the way to get around the island.
Liscannor is the quieter approach to the Cliffs of Moher. A working pier village eight kilometres south of the visitor centre, with Vaughan’s Anchor Inn - Michelin-recommended seafood, three generations of the same family since 1979 - as its default lunch stop. The clifftop trail runs north from above the village to Hag’s Head and on toward the visitor centre. Walk it from this end and you see the cliffs without the turnstile.
Doolin gives you the Cliffs and the music in the same stop. It’s fifteen minutes north of Liscannor on the R478. Gus O’Connor’s has been running trad sessions since 1832 - get there before nine for a seat near the players. McGann’s has a turf fire in winter and a chowder that is not a tourist gesture. The walk south from Doolin harbour covers the full cliff path to Hag’s Head without a car park or a fee. Homestead Cottage at the crossroads has had a Michelin star since 2023 and is worth booking ahead.
Let your guide pick the Connemara timing. The Connemara landscape changes with the light and the weather in a way that the coastal route doesn’t. A bog in flat grey light is just a bog. The same bog on a morning with low cloud and intermittent sun is one of the most beautiful things in Ireland. Your guide will have seen both and knows which road to take when.