Merrion Square

Dublin's finest Georgian square was farmland 250 years ago. Laid out in 1762, three sides are lined with immaculate redbrick townhouses that represent the peak of Georgian domestic architecture in Ireland — each door a different colour, each fanlight a slightly different design. The west side is anchored by Leinster House (now the Irish Parliament), Government Buildings, the Natural History Museum, and the National Gallery. It's an extraordinarily dense concentration of power and culture in a single city block.

The house at No. 1 is where Oscar Wilde grew up. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's leading eye surgeon and a passionate folklorist; his mother, Jane "Speranza" Wilde, ran a famous literary salon. Oscar lived here from 1855 until 1876, and you can now see a statue of him lounging on a rock across the street in the park, permanently smirking at his childhood home. Danny Osborne sculpted the figure from stones from three continents — green nephrite jade from Canada, pink thulite from Norway, and black charnockite from India — and deliberately gave Wilde's face two expressions: one side smiling, the other sombre, representing the wit and the suffering.

Other former residents include W.B. Yeats (No. 82), Daniel O'Connell (No. 58), and the poet George Russell (No. 84). The square has been Dublin's literary epicentre for two centuries. On weekends, the park railings are hung with paintings for sale, turning the square into an open-air gallery.

The park itself was private until 1974, when the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin — who owned the land — handed it to the city. It's now a public park with a playground, and on weekday lunchtimes it fills with government workers from Leinster House eating sandwiches on the grass.