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Obel
The 29-storey Obel, Belfast's tallest building, soars above the waterfront at Donegall Quay. It's the latest stage in the ambitious Laganside Project to redevelop and regenerate the centre of Belfast. All 182 apartments in the building were sold in advance, within 48 hours of being released; it's due for completion some time in 2008.
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Odyssey Arena
The Belfast Giants ice-hockey team draws big crowds to the area at the Odyssey Complex; the season is September to March. The arena also hosts indoor sporting events including tennis and athletics. Also the venue for big entertainment events like rock and pop concerts and stage shows.
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Odyssey Complex
The Odyssey Complex is a huge sporting and entertainment centre on the eastern side of the river across from Clarendon Dock. The complex features a hands-on science centre, a 10,000-seater sports arena (home to the Belfast Giants ice-hockey team), a multiplex cinema with an IMAX screen, a video-games centre and a dozen restaurants, cafés and bars. Kids will love W5, an interactive science centre aimed at children of all ages.
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Ormeau Baths Gallery
Housed in a converted 19th-century public bathhouse, the Ormeau Baths Gallery is Northern Ireland's principal exhibition space for contemporary visual art. The gallery stages changing exhibitions of work by Irish and international artists, and has hosted controversial showings of works by Gilbert and George, and Yoko Ono. The gallery is a few blocks south of Donegall Sq.
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Palm House
The Botanic Gardens' centrepiece is Charles Lanyon's beautiful Palm House, built in 1839 and completed in 1852, with its birdcage dome, a masterpiece in cast-iron and curvilinear glass.
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Parliament House
The dazzling white neoclassical façade of Parliament House at Stormont is one of Belfast's most iconic buildings; in the North, 'Stormont' carries the same connotation as 'Westminster' does in Britain and 'Washington' in the USA - the seat of power. For 40 years, from its completion in 1932 until the introduction of direct rule in 1972, it was the seat of the parliament of Northern Ireland.
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Peace Line
There are steel gates that mark the beginning of the so-called Peace Line, the 6m-high wall of corrugated steel, concrete and chain link that has divided the Protestant and Catholic communities of West Belfast for almost 40 years. Begun in 1970 as a 'temporary measure', it has now outlasted the Berlin Wall, and zigzags for some 4km from the Westlink to the lower slopes of Black Mountain. These days the gates in the wall remain open during the day, but most are still closed from to .
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Pearl Assurance Building
The architectural partnership of Young and MacKenzie counterbalanced the ornate Scottish Provident Building in 1902 with the red sandstone Pearl Assurance Building on Donegall Sq East.
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Queen's University
If you think that Charles Lanyon's Queen's College (1849), a Tudor Revival building in red brick and honey-coloured sandstone, has something of an Oxbridge air about it, that may be because he based the design of the central tower on the 15th-century Founder's Tower at Oxford's Magdalen College.
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Robinson & Cleaver Building
On the north side of square is the 1888 Robinson & Cleaver Building, once the Royal Irish Linen Warehouse and later home to Belfast's finest department store (now occupied by Marks & Spencer). There are 50 busts adorning the façade, representing patrons of the Royal Irish Linen company - look out for Queen Victoria and the Maharajah of Cooch Behar, both former customers.
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Royal Courts of Justice
Across Oxford St lie the 1933 neoclassical Royal Courts of Justice, bombed by the IRA in 1990 but now emerging from behind the massive security screens that once concealed them.
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Royal Victoria Hospital
The Royal Victoria Hospital claims to be the world's first air-conditioned building. The artwork railings date from 1906. Known locally as the RVH, it played an important role in creating the first ever portable defibrillator and, in the 1970s and '80s, developed a well-earned reputation for expertise in the treatment of gunshot wounds.
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Scottish Provident Building
On Donegall Sq West is the ornate 1897-1902 Scottish Provident Building. It's decorated with a veritable riot of fascinating statuary, including several allusions to the industries that assured Victorian Belfast's prosperity, as well as sphinxes, dolphins and lions' heads. The building was the work of the architectural partnership of Young and MacKenzie, who counterbalanced it in 1902 with the red sandstone Pearl Assurance Building on Donegall Sq East.
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Sinclair Seamen's Church
Sinclair Seamen's Church next, to the Harbour Commissioner's Office, was built by Charles Lanyon in 1857-58 and was intended to meet the spiritual needs of visiting sailors. Part church, part maritime museum, it has a pulpit in the shape of a ship's prow (complete with red and green port and starboard lights), a brass ship's wheel and binnacle salvaged from a WWI wreck and, hanging on the wall behind the wheel, the ship's bell from HMS Hood .
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Sir Thomas & Lady Dixon Park
The Sir Thomas & Lady Dixon Park consists of rolling meadows, woodland, riverside fields and formal gardens. The main draw is its spectacular Rose Garden, which contains more than 20,000 blooms. Among other displays, a spiral-shaped garden traces the development of the rose from early shrub roses up to modern hybrids; the roses are in bloom from late July. The park also contains a walled garden, a Japanese-style garden, a children's playground and a café.
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SS Nomadic
In 2006 the SS Nomadic - the only surviving vessel of the White Star Line (they owned the Titanic ) - was rescued from the breaker's yard and brought to Belfast to be restored. The little steamship, which once served as a tender ferrying first- and second-class passengers between Cherbourg harbour and the giant Olympic Class ocean liners (which were too big to dock at the French port) can be visited at the quay next to the Odyssey Complex.
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St Anne's Cathedral
Built in imposing Hiberno-Romanesque style, St Anne's Cathedral was started in 1899 but did not reach its final form until 1981. As you enter you'll see the black-and-white marble floor is laid out in a maze pattern - the black route leads to a dead end, the white to the sanctuary and salvation.
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Stormont Castle
Near Parliament House, 19th-century Stormont Castle is, like Hillsborough in County Down, an official residence of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
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The Entries
The oldest part of Belfast, around High St, suffered considerable damage from WWII bombing. The narrow alleyways running off High and Ann Sts, known as the Entries, were once bustling commercial and residential centres: Pottinger's Entry, for example, had 34 houses in 1822.
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Titanic Quarter
Belfast's former shipbuilding yards - the birthplace of the RMS Titanic - stretch along the east side of the River Lagan, dominated by the towering yellow cranes known as Samson and Goliath. The area is currently undergoing a €1 billion regeneration project known as Titanic Quarter, which plans to develop the long-derelict docklands over the next 15 to 20 years.
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Tropical Ravine
Near Charles Lanyon's beautiful Palm House is the unique Tropical Ravine, a huge red-brick greenhouse designed by the Botanic Gardens' curator Charles McKimm and completed in 1889. Inside, a raised walkway overlooks a jungle of tropical ferns, orchids, lilies and banana plants growing in a sunken glen.
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Ulster Bank Building
The most flamboyant legacy of Belfast's Victorian era is the grandiose 1860 Ulster Bank Building, now home to the Merchant Hotel, this Italianate extravaganza has a portico of soaring columns and sculpted figures depicting Britannia, Justice and Commerce, and iron railings decorated with the Red Hand of Ulster and Irish wolfhounds.
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Ulster Folk & Transport Museums
The 30 buildings on the 60-hectare site range from urban terrace homes to thatched farm cottages. A bridge crosses the A2 to the Transport Museum, a sort of automotive zoo, which contains various Ulster-related vehicles, including a prototype of the vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft.
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Ulster Museum
If the weather washes out a walk in the Botanic Gardens, head instead for the nearby Ulster Museum.
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Union Theological College
Opposite the eastern end of the University Square is the grand, neo-Renaissance Union Theological College (1853), originally the Presbyterian College and yet another Lanyon design. It housed the Northern Ireland Parliament from the partition of Ireland until 1932, when the Parliament Buildings at Stormont were opened.
