If you’re trying to decide where to actually stay while exploring the Giant’s Causeway and the rest of the Causeway Coast, Portrush is the obvious answer — close enough to the Causeway for an easy day trip, but with far more going on in the evenings than Bushmills, and a genuine seaside town rather than a village built around one attraction.
The town
Portrush’s centre sits on Ramore Head, a mile-long peninsula pointing out into the Atlantic, with most of the town’s hotels, restaurants, and bars built along it. Around 6,150 people live here year-round, a number that swells considerably every summer. The headland itself doubles as a natural viewing platform — worth the short walk out for the coastal views alone, seabirds wheeling overhead and, on a clear day, distant landmarks along the coast.
Portrush has been a proper seaside holiday town since Victorian times, and it still has that feel — golden beaches, amusements, cafés, and a genuinely warm welcome, not a manufactured “visitor experience.”
Beaches
Portrush is flanked by two Blue Flag beaches: West Strand (also called West Bay or Mill Strand), running from the harbour toward Portstewart, and East Strand, a broad sweep of sand backed by cafés and amusements, popular with families for safe swimming and flat, wide-open space for kite flying. Whiterocks Beach, with its chalk cliffs, sits just along the coast toward the Causeway — see our geology page for how those white cliffs formed.
Royal Portrush Golf Club
In 2019, Royal Portrush hosted the 148th Open Championship — the first time the tournament had returned to Northern Ireland in almost 70 years, since Max Faulkner won here in 1951. Over 237,000 spectators came to the Causeway Coast that week, and Shane Lowry’s six-shot victory made it one of the most memorable Opens in recent memory. The tournament came back in 2025, with Scottie Scheffler winning the 153rd Open here — proof 2019 wasn’t a one-off, and Royal Portrush is now a genuine fixture on the Open rota, not just a nostalgia booking.
Two more real reasons to know about
North West 200 (May): if you’re planning a visit for May, know that the roads linking Portrush, Portstewart, and Coleraine become “The Triangle” for a weekend — an 8.9-mile closed-road motorcycle circuit that’s been running since 1929 and pulls over 100,000 spectators. Genuinely worth building a trip around if you’re into motorsport; genuinely worth avoiding those specific roads on race day if you’re not.
Curry’s Fun Park: Portrush’s amusement park on Eglinton Street was Barry’s Amusements for decades before reopening under new management in 2022, rides like the Big Dipper included. Still the obvious wet-weather or family-afternoon option in town.
Where to eat and stay
We already cover Portrush in detail elsewhere on this site: the Ramore Group’s six restaurants and bars around the harbour cover everything from fine dining to fast food, and our places to stay page lists three real Portrush properties — Elephant Rock, Blackrock House, and The Carrick — all within easy reach of both the beaches and Dunluce Castle, a few minutes along the coast road toward Bushmills.
Getting there: Portrush sits about 4 miles (6km) from the Giant’s Causeway along the Causeway Coastal Route — see our getting there page for train and bus options, both of which run through Portrush.