Killarney

Ireland's oldest national park (1932) grew out of the gift of the Muckross estate to the Irish state by the Bourn Vincent family, after Queen Victoria's 1861 visit to the Victorian mansion of Muckross House, now a museum within the park. It protects the only extensive relict Atlantic oak wood surviving in Ireland, along with the country's largest herd of native red deer — genetically distinct from the populations reintroduced elsewhere on the island. Its lakes and the ruins of the medieval Muckross Abbey complete a landscape that was also Ireland's first Biosphere Reserve, in 1981.