Belfast Archive - Dark Tourism Blog

Dark Tourism & Graffiti

This is the theme that in the latest poll, as at the bottom of this post, narrowly came second, beaten by just one vote by DT & Bullet Holes, which became the previous Blog post. As I would have voted for Graffiti myself I then decided to compose and post this now without another poll. But I won’t let themed polls become forgotten again. There’ll be new ones before too long. Promise.

So now to this post’s theme of DT & Graffiti – but first I have to

18 July 2024 1 Comment

Dark Tourism & Doors

This time I’d like to revive a tradition that somehow got lost on this Blog over two years ago (well, they’ve been two quite troubled years, so maybe that explains it). What I mean is the “themed posts” we used to have on here quite regularly between mid-2020 and until early 2022. These themes added an often unexpected and occasionally even light-hearted angle to the topic of dark tourism. Today I’ll pick up that tradition again and give you a similar post – now one that is all about doors. And as before this will mostly be a photo essay.

How can doors be dark? Well, the first thing

19 May 2024 24 Comments

Belfast and the “Troubles”

For many tourists visiting Belfast, the main “Troubles”-related activity is those (in)famous Black Taxi Tours – which is exactly what I did on my first trip to the city back in 2012. On my more recent and much longer return trip in April this year I instead chose a walking tour of West Belfast and also did a lot of exploring independently.

A major spot on any “Troubles”-related tour (whether guided or unguided and whether on foot, by taxi or by coach) is the so-called Solidarity Wall (also International Wall). This is actually

14 December 2023 No Comments

Titan and Titanic

It’s been only a few weeks since I published the latest previous Blog Post “Belfast and the Titanic”, based on my recent travels to Northern Ireland.

Now the Titanic has suddenly made headlines in the media worldwide – for all the wrong reasons. You will have probably seen those headlines yourself, but here’s my summary of events as they unfolded (based mainly on my

24 June 2023 2 Comments

Belfast and the Titanic

Belfast is a rare case in terms of tourism. Most of its tourism industry revolves around the two “Big Ts”, that is “the Troubles” (more on that separately later) and the legacy of the RMS Titanic, both catered for by a range of specific individual tourist attractions and activities. It’s not very often that a city’s top tourist attractions all fall within the catchment area of dark tourism. But both

28 May 2023 No Comments

Northern Ireland in 2023

about a month ago I went on a return visit to Northern Ireland (NI). My first visit was back in December 2012, but it was short. I knew lots had changed in the meantime and various new developments warranted inspection from a DT perspective, so a return to this highly intriguing corner of the world was long overdue.

And so on 3 April I set off,

4 May 2023 No Comments

Dark Tourism & Hands

The most recent theme poll didn’t have any winner by last Sunday, but one vote came in late and nudged ‘Hands’ ahead of the other three. So I’ll feature this theme first, but the others will come up here at some later stage as well.

The first photo – featured above – was taken at Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which features plenty of beautiful Gothic elements, but this pretty hand with cobwebs, a detail of a full-body statue, is one of my favourite hand photos of them all! Beautiful and a bit spooky at the same time.

Another favourite is this next one, taken at the fabulous

30 September 2021 2 Comments

Poll Result & this Day in History

Today’s date features repeatedly in the history annals, and some of that has relevance for dark tourism too.

On this day in 1915, Italy joined the Allies in World War One. While The Somme, Ypres and Verdun on the Western Front are household names in this context, Italy’s contribution to the “Great War” is less well known, at least in the anglophone world. Much of the fighting took place in the mountains, such as on the Isonzo front. Some of this is now in Slovenia and parts of

23 May 2021 No Comments

The Titanic

In the early hours of this day 109 years ago, 15 April 1912, the RMS Titanic, the then largest ship afloat, sank off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, following a collision with an iceberg at 11.40 p.m on 14 April. A bit over two and a half hours later she went under. Over 1500 people perished, only ca. 700 survived. It was one of the first big disasters to trigger a worldwide

15 April 2021 No Comments

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