The Most Remarkable Museums in the World

93 places in 31 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Colosseum

   Colosseo

   Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.492° E

   

   The eighty-foot drop beneath the Colosseum's sand floor is where the real machinery of the show lived. That underground level, the hypogeum, was added under Emperor Domitian roughly a decade after the amphitheater opened, and it turned a simple oval arena into something closer to a theater with special effects: two stories of corridors, animal cages, and dozens of hand-cranked, counterweighted elevators that could hoist a leopard, a painted backdrop, or a gladiator straight up through a trapdoor onto the sand, seemingly out of nowhere. Slaves and laborers pushed the winches from below in near-total darkness, timing releases to whatever the show above demanded.

   Did you know? Since 2000, Rome has lit the Colosseum in gold whenever a death sentence anywhere in the world is commuted.

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2. 02 Louvre Museum

   Musée du Louvre

   France · 1.3 km from Paris48.861° N 2.336° E

   

   The Louvre is less a building than a stack of eight centuries. Philip II began a fortress here in the late 12th century to guard Paris from the west, and its lower walls can still be seen in the museum's basement. Charles V turned the fortress into a residence. Francis I began rebuilding it as a French Renaissance palace from 1546, and successive monarchs stretched it along the Seine until Louis XIV left for Versailles in 1682. The Revolution made the empty palace a public museum. It opened on 10 August 1793 with a little over five hundred paintings, most of them from the royal collection or confiscated from the Church and émigrés.

   Did you know? With about 72,735 square metres of space, the Louvre is the largest museum in the world.

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3. 03 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

   Spain · 2.1 km from Bilbao43.269° N 2.934° W

   

   Frank Gehry's museum on the Nervión is the building that gave architecture a phrase: the "Bilbao effect", the idea that one daring cultural project can turn round a declining industrial city. In 1991 the Basque Government offered to pay for a Guggenheim museum on the run-down riverside port land, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation agreed to run it. King Juan Carlos I opened it on 18 October 1997. Within its first three years close to four million people came, and the regional council reckoned that tax on their spending more than repaid the construction bill.

   Did you know? The titanium skin is only about 0.4 mm thick, rolled in Pittsburgh, and all 33,000 plates together weigh only about 60 tonnes.

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4. 04 Castel Sant'Angelo

   Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E

   

   Hadrian started building his own tomb in 123 CE and didn't live to see it finished — it was completed in 139 under his successor Antoninus Pius, a cylindrical drum of a monument meant to hold the ashes of an emperor and his family for eternity. Eternity lasted about three centuries as a mausoleum. By the 5th century Rome's defenders had already folded the tomb into the city's Aurelian Walls as a fortress, because a solid stone cylinder that size, sitting right on the Tiber, was too good a defensive position to leave to the dead.

   Did you know? In 537, as Goths besieged Rome, defenders hurled the tomb's bronze and stone statues down onto the attackers.

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5. 05 Uffizi Gallery

   Palazzo degli Uffizi

   Italy · 1.4 km from Florence43.768° N 11.255° E

   

   The Uffizi began as offices. In 1560 Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari, painter and architect, to build a single home for the magistracies, guilds and agencies of Florence, hence the name, "the offices". Vasari designed two long matching wings enclosing a narrow courtyard that runs from the Piazza della Signoria down to the Arno, where it ends in an open screen of columns framing the river. With its unbroken cornices and repeated bays it is often described as the first regularised street space in Europe. Alfonso Parigi and Bernardo Buontalenti completed the building in 1581.

   Did you know? The octagonal Tribuna's dome is inlaid with nearly 6,000 mother-of-pearl shells brought from the Indian Ocean, set against a scarlet ground.

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6. 06 Natural History Museum

   United Kingdom · 4 km from London51.496° N 0.176° W

   

   South Kensington's great terracotta building was designed as a cathedral of nature, and it still reads like one. Alfred Waterhouse took over the commission after Captain Francis Fowke, winner of the 1864 design competition, died in 1865, and reworked it in his own round-arched Romanesque manner. Construction ran from 1873 to 1880 and the museum opened on 18 April 1881. Waterhouse clad the building inside and out in terracotta tiles, chosen to shrug off the soot of Victorian London, and filled them with relief sculptures of plants and animals: living species in the west wing, extinct ones in the east, a division Richard Owen, the museum's founding spirit, specifically asked for. Look closely and you will find a few deliberate slips, such as bats among the fossils.

   Did you know? Workmen building the 1938 life-size blue whale model left a trapdoor in its belly for secret cigarette breaks, and sealed coins and a telephone directory inside.

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7. 07 Palace of Versailles

   Château de Versailles

   France · 1.1 km from Versailles48.805° N 2.120° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Versailles began as a small brick-and-stone hunting lodge that Louis XIII built in 1623 amid marshes southwest of Paris, a building contemporaries mocked as a house of cards. His son turned it into the stage set of absolute monarchy. Louis XIV, impressed by the château and gardens of his finance minister Nicolas Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte, where he was a guest on 17 August 1661, set the same team, the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the garden designer André Le Nôtre to work, and in 1678 Jules Hardouin-Mansart took over as first architect. From 6 May 1682 until 6 October 1789 the king, the court and the government lived here permanently, apart from the Regency years. The result covers about 63,000 square metres and some 2,300 rooms.

   Did you know? Water was too scarce to run every fountain at once, so fountaineers whistled to each other as the king approached and shut each one off after he passed.

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8. 08 Terracotta Army

   People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head. The villagers' first guess was that they'd disturbed some kind of "Pottery God" idol — it was only after bronze arrowheads and crossbow parts turned up nearby that anyone suspected they'd found something closer to an army.

   Did you know? The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.

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9. 09 Hagia Sophia

   Ayasofya

   Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The building that stands today was put up in barely five years. In January 532 the Nika riots burned down the previous church on the site, and within weeks Emperor Justinian I had started a far more ambitious replacement, designed by two scholars rather than master masons: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus, a geometer. It was dedicated in 537. Its central dome, carried on four curved triangular pendentives over a square plan, created the largest enclosed interior of its age and changed what architects believed was possible. For nearly a thousand years it was the cathedral of Constantinople and the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, and it remained the largest church in the world until the twelfth century.

   Did you know? Envoys of the Kievan Rus' prince reported that inside they could not tell whether they were in heaven or on earth, a verdict tied to Rus' conversion to Orthodoxy.

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10. 10 Metropolitan Museum of Art

    United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W

    

    The Metropolitan Museum of Art occupies almost a quarter of a mile of Fifth Avenue along the eastern edge of Central Park, and inside it holds something close to the whole history of art. Founded in 1870 by a group of businessmen, artists and philanthropists who wanted a national institution for the public, it now lists some 1.5 million works across 17 curatorial departments, from Palaeolithic flints to contemporary painting. With about 5.7 million visitors in the 2025 financial year it was the most visited museum in the United States, and by floor area it is the largest art museum in the Americas.

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11. 11 Palatine Hill

    Palatino

    Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.888° N 12.487° E

    

    The Palatine is the hill where Rome says it began. Roman tradition put the she-wolf's cave, the Lupercal, at its foot and Romulus's founding of the city on its summit, and archaeology is not far off: huts of the early Iron Age have been found here. Later it was the smartest address in the Republic, and from Augustus onwards the emperors built over almost all of it, so thoroughly that the word "palace" comes from its name.

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12. 12 Forbidden City

    People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    For almost five centuries the Forbidden City was the physical centre of the Chinese state. The Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty began it in 1406, after moving the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, and the complex was ready by 1420; from then until 1912 twenty-four emperors, fourteen Ming and ten Qing, lived and ruled here. The name in Chinese, Zijincheng, joins the idea of prohibition with the colour purple, a reference to the Pole Star around which heaven was believed to turn, as the empire turned around the emperor. Ordinary people could not enter. After Puyi's abdication he was allowed to remain in the inner palaces until 1924, and the following year the complex opened as the Palace Museum.

    Did you know? The legend of 9,999 rooms is not borne out by surveys, which count about 8,886 bays of rooms.

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13. 13 Tate Modern

    United Kingdom · 1.5 km from London51.508° N 0.099° W

    

    Tate Modern occupies a power station on the south bank of the Thames, and the building matters as much as the art. Bankside Power Station was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed Battersea Power Station. It was built between 1947 and 1963, stands directly across the river from St Paul's Cathedral, and closed in 1981. It escaped demolition when the Tate chose it in 1994 as the home for its international modern collection. The Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron kept the brick shell and the tall chimney and added a two-storey glass lightbox on the roof. The gallery opened in 2000. The collection displays are free, which helps explain why this is the most visited art gallery in the country.

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14. 14 Van Gogh Museum

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.4 km from Amsterdam52.358° N 4.881° E

    

    No other museum holds as much of Vincent van Gogh's work: about 200 paintings, 400 drawings and 700 of his letters. The collection survived because his family kept it. When Vincent died in 1890 his unsold work went to his brother Theo, who died six months later. Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, then spent decades organising exhibitions, and she did more than anyone to build the painter's reputation. Her son, Vincent Willem, eventually placed the collection in a state-backed foundation, and the museum opened on 2 June 1973 on Amsterdam's Museumplein, between the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk.

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15. 15 Museum of Modern Art

    United States · 4.7 km from New York City40.762° N 73.978° W

    

    The Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street in Manhattan did more than any other institution to shape the idea of modern art, and many of the pictures that define it hang here. Three collectors started it in 1929: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. It opened in a few rented rooms on Fifth Avenue on 7 November, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., treated photography, film, architecture and design as art alongside painting, and MoMA was the first museum to create departments for photography and film. In 1939 it moved into its own International Style building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on land donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had at first opposed the whole idea.

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16. 16 Neuschwanstein Castle

    Schloss Neuschwanstein

    Germany47.557° N 10.749° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The name suggests a medieval stronghold; the building is closer to a 19th-century stage set with plumbing. Ludwig II commissioned it in 1868, right after the Austro-Prussian War had stripped Bavaria of real independence and left him a king with a crown but shrinking power — and what he built instead of political influence was a retreat modelled on the operas of Richard Wagner, whom he'd idolised since adolescence. Ludwig sketched the fantasy in his own hand; it fell to the architect Georg von Dollmann to turn those sketches into working drawings and actual stone. The Singers' Hall and Throne Room aren't generic medieval fantasy; they're built around scenes from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, with Ludwig effectively commissioning a piece of architecture as an extension of Wagner's stage designs.

    Did you know? Ludwig II spent only 172 days in the palace he had dreamed of, and it was called New Hohenschwangau until after his death.

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17. 17 Musée d'Orsay

    France · 2 km from Paris48.860° N 2.327° E

    

    The Musée d'Orsay lives in a railway station, and the building is half the experience. The Gare d'Orsay was built on the Left Bank for the Paris–Orléans railway in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, designed by Victor Laloux with Lucien Magne and Émile Bénard. The station later fell out of main-line use and survived by luck: a hotel was planned on the site in the early 1970s before the state listed it and decided to fill it with the art of 1848 to 1914. The architects of ACT Architecture converted it, Gae Aulenti designed the interior, and President Mitterrand opened the museum in December 1986.

    Did you know? Before it became a museum, the empty station served as the main set for Orson Welles's 1962 film The Trial.

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18. 18 Doge's Palace

    Palazzo Ducale

    Italy · 0.7 km from Venice45.434° N 12.340° E

    

    Seen from the lagoon, the Doge's Palace does something no textbook building should: its heavy, nearly solid upper storey sits on two tiers of delicate Gothic arcades, as if the palace were balanced on lace. That inversion is the signature of Venetian Gothic, and this is its grandest example. For nearly a thousand years the palace was the seat of the Doge and the government of the Republic of Venice, holding council chambers, law courts, offices and prisons as well as the Doge's own apartments.

    Did you know? The only art theft from the palace came in 1991, when a thief hid in a prison cell after a tour and crossed the Bridge of Sighs at night.

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19. 19 Montreal Biosphère

    Canada · 4.4 km from Montreal45.514° N 73.531° W

    

    On Saint Helen's Island in the St. Lawrence River, a huge lattice sphere catches the light above the trees. The Montreal Biosphere is the steel skeleton of a geodesic dome designed by R. Buckminster Fuller with Shoji Sadao for Expo 67, 76 metres across and 62 metres high. It is built as a double layer, with inner and outer grids of struts joined by a latticework of struts, and it once enclosed a skin of transparent acrylic cells that turned the whole structure into a vast glowing bubble.

    Did you know? The dome inspired Disney's Spaceship Earth at Epcot, and it later appeared as a World Wonder in the video game Civilization VI.

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20. 20 Bayeux Tapestry

    Tapisserie de Bayeux

    France · 27.4 km from Caen49.274° N 0.700° W

    

    Some seventy metres long and only about half a metre high, the Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the Norman Conquest of England as a continuous strip of images, like a medieval graphic novel read from left to right. Strictly speaking it is not a tapestry at all but an embroidery: wool thread in ten natural dye colours stitched onto a coarse linen ground. Across 58 scenes it shows more than six hundred people, nearly a thousand animals, ships, castles and churches, with short Latin captions naming the action.

    Did you know? In 1792 revolutionaries seized it to cover military wagons, and it was saved only because a local lawyer pulled it from a wagon and hid it at home.

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21. 21 Hadrian's Villa

    Villa Adriana

    Italy · 24.9 km from Rome41.942° N 12.775° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Hadrian was the Roman emperor who actually left the empire to go look at it — he spent more of his reign travelling its provinces than any predecessor, and when he came home, he didn't just bring back souvenirs. Between roughly 125 and 134 CE he built a private estate outside Rome that was, in effect, a scale model of everywhere he'd been, with sections deliberately named after the places that had inspired them: a Lyceum and Academia after Athenian institutions, a Poikile echoing the city's famous painted colonnade, and a long reflecting pool called the Canopus, modelled on the Nile delta near Alexandria.

    Did you know? The Maritime Theatre is a round island villa 25 metres across, ringed by a moat and once reached by two wooden drawbridges.

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22. 22 Herculaneum

    Scavi archeologici di Ercolano

    Italy · 9.7 km from Naples40.806° N 14.348° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Herculaneum was a small, wealthy seaside town of perhaps 5,000 people on the Bay of Naples, and in AD 79 the eruption of Vesuvius buried it under some 20 metres of hot volcanic material. Unlike the ash and pumice that fell on Pompeii, the flows that engulfed Herculaneum carbonised and sealed organic material: roof beams, beds, doors, food and the papyrus scrolls of the Villa of the Papyri. It was the first of the Vesuvian cities to be found, in 1709, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Pompeii.

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23. 23 Topkapı Palace

    Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.013° N 28.984° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    For almost four centuries the Ottoman Empire was governed from a headland at the very tip of old Istanbul. Mehmed II began Topkapı Palace in 1459, a few years after taking Constantinople, on Seraglio Point, where the Golden Horn opens into the Bosphorus and both meet the Sea of Marmara. The site was chosen for exactly what still stuns visitors: from the terraces the view sweeps across water on three sides, with ships moving between two continents. The sultans lived and ruled here until the court moved to the new Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosphorus in the mid-19th century, and in 1924, after the end of the empire, the palace became a museum.

    Did you know? The palace stands on the site of the acropolis of ancient Byzantion, and parts of its outer walls date back to Byzantine times.

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24. 24 Musée de l'Orangerie

    France · 2.3 km from Paris48.864° N 2.323° E

    

    Two white oval rooms, lit from above by daylight, hold eight of Claude Monet's Water Lilies panels in an unbroken loop of water, sky and reflection. Each panel is two metres high, and together they run for about 91 metres along the curved walls, so that the viewer stands inside the pond rather than in front of it. Seen from above, the two rooms trace the sign of infinity, and the layout follows the east–west axis of the city, the same line that runs from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe.

    Did you know? Before the Orangerie was built, the Tuileries citrus trees spent their winters inside the Louvre's Grande Galerie.

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25. 25 Hampton Court Palace

    United Kingdom · 18.8 km from London51.403° N 0.337° W

    

    Hampton Court is two palaces in one: a red-brick Tudor palace of turreted gatehouses, twisted chimneys and a great hall, and, grafted onto it, a Baroque palace by Sir Christopher Wren built to answer Versailles. Set beside the Thames about 19 km south-west of central London, it was begun in 1514 by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII's chief minister, who meant it to be the finest house in England. In 1529, with his fall from favour approaching, Wolsey handed it to the king; he died the following year.

    Did you know? Henry VIII was so impatient for his Great Hall that the masons were made to work through the night by candlelight.

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26. 26 Heydar Aliyev Center

    Azerbaijan · 0.6 km from Baku40.395° N 49.867° E

    

    Few buildings anywhere look so little like buildings. The Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku rises out of its landscaped hill as a single white surface that folds, swells and peels away from the ground, turning wall into roof and roof into plaza without a visible seam or a single hard corner. Zaha Hadid Architects won the commission in a 2007 competition, and the result, finished in 2012, has become the emblem of the city's oil-era rebuilding: a 74-metre-high wave of some 57,500 square metres that even appears on the national 200-manat banknote.

    Did you know? Zaha Hadid's win with this building in 2014 made her the first woman ever to take the Design Museum's Design of the Year award outright.

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27. 27 Rijksmuseum

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.2 km from Amsterdam52.360° N 4.885° E

    

    The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands and the place to understand the Dutch Golden Age in one visit. It was founded in The Hague in 1798, moved to Amsterdam in 1808 on the orders of Louis Bonaparte, and spent decades in borrowed rooms before Pierre Cuypers won a competition for a new building. His museum, which opened in 1885 on what is now the Museumplein, mixes Gothic and Renaissance forms and is decorated inside and out with references to Dutch art history. A tunnel runs straight through the middle of the building; it is still used by cyclists.

    Did you know? The national collection began so modestly that it fitted into five rooms of Huis ten Bosch palace, and at first owned no Rembrandt, Hals or Vermeer.

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28. 28 Madinat Al-Zahra

    Spain · 8.6 km from Córdoba37.886° N 4.868° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Madinat al-Zahra, "the radiant city", was the palace-capital of the Caliphate of Córdoba, built from 936–940 by Abd ar-Rahman III just west of the city. He had declared himself caliph in 929, and a new city was his statement of equal rank with the Abbasids of Baghdad and the Fatimids of North Africa. Within barely seventy years it was over: after 1010 it was sacked in the civil wars that broke up the caliphate, abandoned, and quarried for building stone for centuries.

    Did you know? A chronicler described a domed hall at Madinat al-Zahra with a pool of mercury that could be stirred to scatter dazzling light; it has never been found.

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29. 29 Vatican Museums

    Musei Vaticani

    Vatican City · 2.4 km from Rome41.906° N 12.454° E

    

    The Vatican Museums grew from a single statue. In January 1506 the Laocoön group was dug up in a vineyard in Rome; Pope Julius II sent Michelangelo and Giuliano da Sangallo to look at it, bought it, and put it on show in the Vatican a month later. Five centuries of papal collecting followed, and the museums now hold around 70,000 works, some 20,000 of them on display in galleries, courtyards and apartments of the papal palaces.

    Did you know? In 2024 the Vatican Museums drew about 6.8 million visitors, ranking second among the world's art museums after the Louvre.

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30. 30 Secession Building

    Wiener Secessionsgebäude

    Austria · 0.2 km from Vienna48.200° N 16.366° E

    

    A white cube crowned by a dome of gilded wrought-iron laurel leaves, the Secession Building looks less like a gallery than a small temple, and that was the point. Joseph Maria Olbrich designed it in 1897–98 as the home and manifesto of the Vienna Secession, the group of painters, sculptors and architects around Gustav Klimt who had broken away from the city's conservative artists' association. Above the entrance, in gold letters, runs their creed, coined by the critic Ludwig Hevesi: "Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit" – to every age its art, to art its freedom. Viennese wits were less reverent, nicknaming the dome the "cabbage head" and mocking the smooth, windowless walls as an "Assyrian convenience".

    Did you know? The gilded dome is made up of about 2,500 wrought-iron laurel leaves and 311 berries.

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