The Most Remarkable Science Museums in the World

17 places in 10 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 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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2. 02 SS Great Britain

   United Kingdom · 1.7 km from Bristol51.449° N 2.608° W

   

   When she was launched in Bristol in 1843, the SS Great Britain was by far the largest ship ever built, and the most daring. Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed her for the Great Western Steamship Company's Atlantic service, and in doing so became the first to combine two new technologies in a large ocean-going ship: an iron hull and a screw propeller. She was 322 feet long, displaced around 3,400 tons, and in 1845 became the first iron steamer to cross the Atlantic, in 14 days. From 1845 to 1853 she was the largest passenger ship in the world.

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3. 03 Oceanographic Museum of Monaco

   Musée océanographique de Monaco

   Monaco · 1.8 km from Monaco43.731° N 7.425° E

   

   Built into the sheer southern face of the Rock of Monaco, the Oceanographic Museum rises some 85 metres straight out of the Mediterranean, a palace of pale stone whose foundations seem to grow from the cliff itself. It was the creation of Prince Albert I, a sovereign who spent much of his life at sea as a pioneering oceanographer, and it was inaugurated in 1910 after eleven years of work that consumed around 100,000 tonnes of stone quarried at La Turbie, in the hills above the principality. The architecture is a sumptuous Baroque Revival, and the façade carries the names of twenty research ships chosen by the prince — a roll of honour for the vessels that opened up the study of the oceans.

   Did you know? The tropical alga Caulerpa taxifolia, kept in the museum's aquarium, was first found in the sea just below the building in 1984 and later spread across the Mediterranean.

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4. 04 HMS Victory

   United Kingdom · 2.1 km from Portsmouth50.802° N 1.110° W

   

   HMS Victory is still a commissioned warship of the Royal Navy, and has been for more than two centuries: she was first commissioned in 1778, making her the oldest naval vessel in commission anywhere. Since 2012 she has been the flagship of the First Sea Lord. She is also the ship on which Horatio Nelson was mortally wounded at Trafalgar, and walking her decks at Portsmouth is the closest anyone can come to the cramped, noisy world of a sailing navy at war.

   Did you know? When she was floated out in 1765 she proved about nine and a half inches too wide for the dock gates, and shipwrights hacked wood off the gates with adzes.

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5. 05 Museum of Tomorrow

   Museu do Amanhã

   Brazil · 3.7 km from Rio de Janeiro22.894° S 43.179° W

   

   The Museum of Tomorrow stands at the end of Pier Mauá in Rio de Janeiro, reaching out into Guanabara Bay like a skeleton of white steel. It was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who said he drew inspiration from the bromeliads of Rio's botanical garden, and it opened on 17 December 2015. The building was an anchor of Porto Maravilha, the project that reclaimed Rio's run-down port district in the years before the 2016 Olympics, and it quickly became one of the city's new landmarks.

   Did you know? The only physical artefact in the main exhibition is a wooden churinga, a sacred object of Aboriginal Australians about two metres tall, found in a Paris antiques shop.

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6. 06 Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe

   Museo de las Ciencias Príncipe Felipe

   Spain · 5.5 km from Valencia39.456° N 0.352° W

   

   The Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe is the long white skeleton that seems to lie beached in the old bed of the Turia in Valencia. Designed by Santiago Calatrava as part of his City of Arts and Sciences, the building is about 220 metres long, 80 wide and 55 high, a sequence of repeated concrete ribs and glass that is often compared to the bones of a whale. It was symbolically inaugurated in March 2000 by Felipe, then Prince of Asturias and now King Felipe VI, and opened to the public in November that year.

   Did you know? Its Foucault pendulum, more than 30 metres long, hangs from the glass roof and takes about 34 hours to complete a full turn at Valencia's latitude.

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7. 07 Museum of the Future

   United Arab Emirates · 0.7 km from Dubai25.219° N 55.282° E

   

   Seen from Sheikh Zayed Road, the Museum of the Future looks less like a building than a single polished object: a stainless-steel ring, some 77 metres tall, lying on its side on a planted green mound, with a great oval void through its middle. There are no straight walls and no vertical columns inside. The shell is made of 1,024 composite panels clad in steel, and each one is a unique three-dimensional piece, because together they carry an unbroken band of Arabic script that wraps the whole surface. At night the letters are lit from within, and the torus reads as a glowing calligraphic scroll hanging between the office towers.

   Did you know? The museum opened on 22 February 2022, a date written 22.2.22 that was promoted as Twosday.

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8. 08 Science Museum, London

   Science Museum

   United Kingdom · 3.9 km from London51.498° N 0.175° W

   

   The Science Museum on Exhibition Road began life alongside its neighbour, the Victoria and Albert Museum, as part of the South Kensington Museum. It was founded in 1857 from the collections of the Royal Society of Arts and surplus items from the Great Exhibition, absorbed the Patent Office Museum, and became an independent institution in 1909. Its main building by Sir Richard Allison opened in stages between 1919 and 1928, and the Wellcome Wing was added in 2000. Like Britain's other national museums, it is free to enter.

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9. 09 Mary Rose

   United Kingdom · 1.9 km from Portsmouth50.800° N 1.107° W

   

   The Mary Rose is the hull of a warship of Henry VIII, raised from the seabed of the Solent after more than four centuries. She was built at Portsmouth from 1510, launched in 1511 and served for over thirty years as one of the largest ships of the Tudor navy, one of the first purpose-built sailing warships able to fire heavy guns through lidded gunports. On 19 July 1545, leading an attack on a French invasion fleet off Spithead, she heeled over, water poured through the open gunports and she sank within sight of the shore. Most of the men who managed to climb up from below were trapped under the anti-boarding netting stretched over the open decks and went down with her; the cause of the disaster is still debated.

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10. 10 Phaeno Science Center

    Phæno

    Germany · 28.1 km from Brunswick52.429° N 10.790° E

    

    Phaeno is a science centre, but the first thing it shows you is the building. Zaha Hadid won the design competition in 2000, working with the structural engineers Adams Kara Taylor and the German practice Mayer Bährle, and the centre opened on 24 November 2005. It is a long concrete body — about 170 metres from end to end and 16 metres high — lifted off the ground on ten hollow, flaring concrete cones up to seven metres across. Walk underneath and the space between the cones feels like a lit cave; walk inside and there is hardly a right angle: tilted walls, sloping niches, slits cut through bare concrete, an exposed steel roof overhead. The building won a RIBA European Award in 2006 and has since played a weapons company's headquarters in the thriller The International and a particle collider in the German disaster film Heroes.

    Did you know? When built, Phaeno was Europe's largest structure made of self-compacting concrete, a material never before used on such a scale in Germany.

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11. 11 RRS Discovery

    United Kingdom · 2.5 km from Dundee56.457° N 2.967° W

    

    RRS Discovery was built in Dundee for one purpose: to survive the Antarctic ice. Launched on 21 March 1901 by the Dundee Shipbuilders Company, she was the last traditional three-masted wooden ship built in Britain, a barque with an auxiliary steam engine and a hull more than two feet thick in places, reinforced with closely spaced oak frames so that pack ice would squeeze her upwards rather than crush her.

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12. 12 Teylers Museum

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 0.7 km from Haarlem52.381° N 4.640° E

    

    Teylers Museum in Haarlem is the oldest museum in the Netherlands and a rare surviving museum of the Enlightenment: a place where each room was fitted out in the spirit of its own time and then, remarkably, left almost untouched. It grew from the will of Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, a wealthy Mennonite cloth merchant and banker who died in 1778 and left his fortune to promote religion, art and science. His executors decided to create a centre of study and display under one roof, modelled on the ancient idea of a "mouseion", a temple of the muses open to scholars.

    Did you know? In 1970 the palaeontologist John Ostrom spotted feather impressions on a fossil here labelled as a pterosaur and identified it as an Archaeopteryx.

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13. 13 Cutty Sark

    United Kingdom · 7.9 km from London51.483° N 0.010° W

    

    Few ships were built for speed as single-mindedly as Cutty Sark. She was ordered in 1869 by the London shipowner John "Jock" Willis for the China tea trade, where the first cargo of the season fetched the best price and merchants advertised the names of the fastest ships. Hercules Linton drew her lines and his young firm, Scott & Linton, began building her at Dumbarton on the River Leven; when the yard ran out of money, William Denny & Brothers finished the job, and she was launched on 22 November 1869. Her name comes from Robert Burns's poem Tam o' Shanter, in which a witch dressed only in a short shift, a "cutty sark" in Scots, chases Tam and snatches the tail of his horse.

    Did you know? Her best day's run was 363 nautical miles in 24 hours, an average of about 15 knots.

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14. 14 USS Missouri

    United States · 11.8 km from Honolulu21.362° N 157.953° W

    

    USS Missouri, known as the "Mighty Mo", was the last battleship ever commissioned by the United States and now lies at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor as a museum ship. An Iowa-class battleship completed in 1944, she is 270 metres long, with nine 16-inch guns in three turrets. She fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and bombarded the Japanese home islands. Off Okinawa in April 1945 a kamikaze aircraft hit the ship; the resulting fire was quickly put out and the damage was superficial.

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15. 15 Università di Firenze Museo Zoologico "La Specola"

    Museo di storia naturale sezione di zoologia La Specola

    Italy · 1.7 km from Florence43.765° N 11.247° E

    

    Few museums anywhere are as uncanny as La Specola. On the Via Romana, a few steps from the Pitti Palace, room after room of 18th-century cabinets hold stuffed animals and, beyond them, one of the world's most celebrated collections of anatomical waxes: flayed bodies, dissected hearts, nerves and lymph vessels modelled with a precision that still unsettles visitors two centuries later. Founded in the 1770s, it is often described as the oldest scientific museum in Europe opened to the public, and its rooms preserve the spirit of the Enlightenment almost intact. Today it belongs to the University of Florence's natural history museum.

    Did you know? La Specola opened to the public in 1775 and is often called the oldest scientific museum in Europe.

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16. 16 La Géode

    France · 4.8 km from Paris48.894° N 2.389° E

    

    Seen from across the canal basin of the Parc de la Villette, La Géode hardly looks like a building at all: a sphere 36 metres across, skinned in 6,433 polished stainless-steel triangles, each about a metre and a half long, that turn the sky, the trees and the passing clouds into a slightly warped mirror image of themselves. On a grey Paris day it almost disappears; at sunset it catches fire. The ball sits in a shallow pool beside the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, so that it is reflected twice over, once in its own skin and once in the water below.

    Did you know? Behind the mirrored skin sits a completely separate inner sphere of reinforced concrete weighing about 6,000 tonnes, held up by a single central pillar 17 metres tall.

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17. 17 Museo Galileo

    Italy · 1.5 km from Florence43.768° N 11.256° E

    

    Few rooms on earth let you stand this close to the instruments that rearranged the sky. In a riverside palace a few steps from the Uffizi, the Museo Galileo keeps the only two telescopes known to survive from Galileo's own hands, together with the framed objective lens of the instrument through which he first picked out the moons of Jupiter in January 1610. Around them are gathered several centuries of Tuscan curiosity: astrolabes, sundials, globes, compasses, surveying tools and early thermometers, assembled first by the Medici and later by the Habsburg-Lorraine grand dukes who followed them.

    Did you know? Galileo's only two surviving telescopes are kept in the Museo Galileo.

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