Zuckerberg buys 200-year-old Irish castle for millions of euros

Mark Zuckerberg has acquired a property quite unlike anything he's owned before: together with his wife Priscilla Chan, the Meta founder has bought Strancally Castle in southeast Ireland, along with its roughly 178-hectare estate. The exact price has not been disclosed, but The Irish Times estimates the property's value at between 20 and 30 million euros — somewhere between half a billion and three-quarters of a billion crowns.

The choice of Ireland is no accident: the country has been home to Meta's European headquarters since 2009, drawn there by low taxes. Besides its offices in Dublin and Cork, the company also runs a data centre in County Meath and employs around 1,500 people in the country. Ireland is generally popular among major American corporations thanks to its favourable tax regime.

Zuckerberg and Chan themselves live permanently in the US and plan to use the new estate during visits to Ireland. The castle, built around 1830, covers about 1,500 square metres across three floors and is surrounded by grounds roughly the size of 250 football pitches. Over the last two decades the building has undergone a thorough renovation, which added, among other things, an indoor pool. Before the deal with Zuckerberg, it was owned for 25 years by Michael and Giancarla Allen-Buckley.

Interestingly, a year earlier Zuckerberg had been eyeing another Irish castle — one that belonged to billionaire John Malone — but that deal never went through.

Zuckerberg is far from the only billionaire to have fallen for the Irish countryside: nearby is Ballinatray House, bought in 2024 by Dyson founder James Dyson, while Stripe co-founder John Collison owns the sprawling Abbey Leix estate. Irish castle owners also include actor Jeremy Irons and film producer Christy Cashman. The main draw, it seems, is the privacy and sense of total security that are hard to find in expensive city real estate but easy to come by on the vast private estates of rural Ireland.