TOP 5 Outdoor Museums

We bring to your attention 5 outdoor museums where you can easily take a fantastic journey into the past.

An outdoor museum is a magical place. In these museums, you can turn into a blacksmith or a cheese maker, find yourself in a real mill, learn how to shoot a bow or bake bread according to village recipes.

Skansen. Stockholm, Sweden

The most famous and the first open-air ethnographic museum in the world was opened in 1891. At this outdoor museum you can take a tour of the expanses of Sweden from north to south, from the sixteenth century to the present day. More than 160 houses and ancient estates built at different times are collected here. There is a zoo where moose, wolves, foxes, and reindeer live. There are rides and many cafes where you can taste traditional dishes of different peoples inhabiting Sweden.

On the territory of the outdoor museum, artisans – glass blowers, potters, bakers, leather craftsmen – work on their products, not paying any attention to tourists, and actors in national costumes are busy with ordinary everyday affairs, recreating the atmosphere of everyday life of that time.

De Zaanse Schans, Neighborhood of Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Zaanse Schans is an open-air folklore museum that will take you to Holland in the 17th and 18th centuries. The most amazing thing in the outdoor museum is the wide river, along which magnificent old mills lined up in a row.

Dutch windmills, around which tulips grow, flap their wide wings, telling their unique stories. Here you can see how various windmills (sawmills, paint mills, oil presses and others) work. In the village, there is a museum of the region  called “Zaans Museum”. You can watch and even participate in demonstrations of ancient crafts – making wooden clogs, painting the famous Delft porcelain, smelting tin, and making cheese.

Den Gamle By – The Old Town Museum, Aarhus, Denmark

To visit the Danish city of Aarhus and not visit Den Gamle By, you must have very good reasons for this. This outdoor museum is one of the most interesting and visited places in Denmark. Den Gamle By is a small town of 75 houses where you can see Denmark as it was centuries ago. Many houses and buildings are interesting in their own right, but here you will also find many museum finds illustrating the life and crafts of that time.

You can visit a shoe shop, or a toy shop, or just look at the kitchen utensils of that time. All these buildings are not copies, but real houses from different parts of Denmark, disassembled stone by stone, transported and reassembled in the Aarhus Botanical Garden. Founded in 1909, Den Gamle Byu slowly grew. In this outdoor museum, you will see a small port, old mills, workshops, shops and city dwellers dressed according to the times.

Hessenpark Open Air Museum, Germany

About a hundred historical buildings are located on the territory of the outdoor museum: residential rural houses, churches, workshops, schools, forges, shops, windmills – everything that has been built in Hesse over the past 400 years. Some of them continue to perform their functions. Tables are laid in the tavern. The markets sell ceramics and food products. At the end of December, a colorful Christmas market is immediately organized. On weekends, various workshops hold master classes in pottery, broom making and other ancient crafts.

Open Air Museum of Ethnography, Tbilisi, Georgia

The Ethnographic Museum is located right under the open sky on the slope near Turtle Lake in Vake Park. On its territory there are traditional houses and outbuildings collected from all regions of Georgia. The creator of the outdoor museum, the famous ethnographer George Chitaya, actually reproduced the whole country in miniature on a small piece of land.