Reading list · Places in a book

The real places in Ulysses

Every location below is a real place Ulysses by James Joyce is actually set in — verified against the book and mapped so you can read your way there before you go.

3 real places · grounded to Ulysses

What real places is Ulysses set in?

Ulysses by James Joyce is set in 3 real places you can visit: Dublin, Sandycove, and Sandymount Strand — each a location the novel actually unfolds in.

  • Dublin
  • Sandycove (Dublin Bay)
  • Sandymount Strand (Dublin)

  1. Dublin

    Leopold Bloom's day threads the whole city - from the Freeman's Journal offices and Davy Byrnes pub to the funeral out at Glasnevin Cemetery - the most exhaustively mapped city in modern fiction.

    Books set in Dublin

  2. Sandycove

    Dublin Bay

    The novel opens at the Martello tower at Sandycove - now the James Joyce Tower and Museum - where Buck Mulligan shaves on the gun-rest above the "snotgreen sea."

  3. Sandymount Strand

    Dublin

    Stephen Dedalus walks the tide-line of Sandymount Strand in the Proteus episode; the same beach returns at dusk in Nausicaa, where Bloom watches Gerty MacDowell.

James Joyce's world

See every real place James Joyce's stories are set in — one guide across all their books.

Reading your way into Ulysses

Joyce famously said that if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt from Ulysses. The novel maps a single day - 16 June 1904 - across the real city with obsessive precision, and readers still walk Bloom's route every Bloomsday. The locations below are among its most famous fixed points.