Museums in Sweden

The Royal Coin Cabinet

The Royal Coin Cabinet is a museum dedicated to the history of money. The museum includes exhibitions of coins, banknotes (the first in the world was issued in 1661 by Stockholms Banco), treasure hoards and piggy banks. Particularly notable are the oldest Swedish coin, a copper plate coin dating from Queen Christina's reign in 1644 that is thought at 19.7 kg to be the heaviest in the world, some of the Lohe treasure found ...
Founded: | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Vasa Museum

The Vasa Museum (Vasamuseet) is a maritime museum displaying the only almost fully intact 17th century ship that has ever been salvaged, the 64-gun warship Vasa that sank on her maiden voyage in 1628. Opened in 1990, the Vasa Museum is one of the most visited museums in Scandinavia. The main hall contains the ship itself and various exhibits related to the archaeological findings of the ships and early 17th century Swede ...
Founded: 1990 | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm City Museum

The Stockholm City Museum documents and exhibits the history of Stockholm. It was opened to the public in 1942 and located in the palace completed in 1685. The museum is the largest municipal museum in Sweden, and houses collections which include 300,000 items of historical interest; 20,000 works of art and 3 million photographs. The museum has two permanent exhibitions, one called "The Stockholm Exhibition - Based on a ...
Founded: 1942 | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

The Museum of Medieval Stockholm

The Museum of Medieval Stockholm was constructed around old monuments excavated in an extensive archaeological dig in the late 1970s. Part of Stockholm's city wall, dating from the early 16th century, was also found. The museum enables visitors to experience medieval Stockholm, with its brick houses and booths, workshops, harbour and gallows. It relates the medieval history of the city from the 1250s to the 1520s. In 2010 ...
Founded: | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Skansen Open Air Museum

Skansen is the first open air museum and zoo in Sweden. It was founded in 1891 by Artur Hazelius (1833-1901) to show the way of life in the different parts of Sweden before the industrial era. Skansen attracts more than 1.3 million visitors each year. The many exhibits over the 75 acre (300,000 m²) site include a full replica of an average 19th-century town, in which craftsmen in traditional dress such as tanners, shoema ...
Founded: 1891 | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Uppland Museum

The Upplandsmuseet (Uppland Museum) is the county museum of Uppsala County. The institution is responsible for preservation and conducting research in the area of the cultural history and archaeology of the county, including the city of Uppsala (parts of the historical province of Uppland, from which the museum takes its name, belong to Stockholm County). The permanent exhibition covers subjects such as the history of the ...
Founded: 1957 | Location: Uppsala, Sweden

Gustavianum

Gustavianum is the former main building of Uppsala University, built 1622–1625 and named after King Gustavus Adolphus. Under the cupola is the theatrum anatomicum, the second oldest in the world added to the building in the mid 17th century by Olaus Rudbeck, professor of medicine and amateur architect, among other things. Although still used for lectures and conferences, most of Gustavianum functions as a museum, inclu ...
Founded: 1622-1625 | Location: Uppsala, Sweden

Gothenburg Museum of Art

The Göteborg Museum of Art at Götaplatsen, Gothenburg, is renowned for its collection of Nordic art from around the close of the 19th century. A must see is the lavishly decorated Fürstenberg Gallery, named after a leading Gothenburg art donor, Pontus Fürstenberg and his wife Göthilda. Among the artists showcased one can mention Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn, and P.S. Kröyer. The museum also hou ...
Founded: 1923 | Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

Lund Historical Museum

The Historical museum in Lund, founded in 1805, is the second largest archaeological museum in Sweden. Its collections contain among other things Kilian Stobaeus' Cabinet of Curiosities from the 18th century, thousands of finds from the excavations of the Iron Age city of Uppåkra and numerous artefacts from the Scanian Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. The museum also has the second largest coin collection in the country ...
Founded: 1805 | Location: Lund, Sweden

Medical History Museum

History of health and medical care is exhibited in a 200-year-old former hospital. The museum is located in the Oterdahl building, donated by wholesaler Aron Oterdahl in 1808 to Sahlgren hospital as a gift “for time eternal”. The exhibition is set up based on various, still current, themes and presents a history of the development of western medicine from antiquity to our times.
Founded: 1808 | Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

Strindberg Museum

The Strindberg Museum (Strindbergsmuseet) is dedicated to the writer August Strindberg and located in his last dwelling, in the house he nicknamed the "Blå tornet" (The Blue Tower). The Museum is owned by the Strindberg Society of Sweden and was inaugurated in 1973. Strindberg moved to the house in 1908 and lived there until his death in 1912. The Museum consists of Strindberg's flat and library, as well as an area for ...
Founded: 1973 | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Gotland Museum

The fine Gotlands Fornsal Museum provides comprehensive coverage of Visby's past. Housed in an 18th century distillery and a medieval warehouse, it holds five storeys of exhibition halls covering eight thousand years of history, as well as a good courtyard café and bookshop. Among the most impressive sections are the Hall of Picture Stones, a collection of richly carved stones dating mostly from the 5th to 11th ce ...
Founded: 1875 | Location: Visby, Sweden

Swedish Army Museum

The Swedish Army Museum, was awarded the title of the best museum of Stockholm in 2005. Its displays illustrate the military history of Sweden, including its modern policy of neutrality, and of the Swedish Army. The building was erected in the 17th century as an arsenal for the production and storage of artillery weapons. The exhibition includes life-size figures of soldiers of past centuries, as well as scenes of the gr ...
Founded: 2002 | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

East India Company House

The old East India Company House (now the City Museum) was once the hub of Sweden's trade with the Far East. Most seafaring nations in the 18th century had an East India company which held a monopoly on trade with the East. Scottish merchants were not part of the lucrative dealings of the English, so Scot Colin Campbell, in association with Niclas Sahlgren in Gothenburg, devised an idea for a Swedish East India Company, w ...
Founded: 1750-1762 | Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

National Historical Museum

The National Historical Museum (Historiska muséet) covers Swedish cultural history and art from the Stone Age to the 16th century. The museum is known for its so called "Gold Room" (Guldrummet) by the architect Leif Blomberg, where a large number of gold objects are kept as part of the exhibition. The museum hosts also the largest Viking exhibition, with more than 4,000 original artifacts.
Founded: 1866 | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Gothenburg Maritime Museum

The exhibitions at the Maritime Museum tell 400 years of maritime history. Themes include pirates past and present, life at sea, the Swedish American Line and much more. There are four permanent exhibitions displaying the history of sea routes, flows of people and ideas, Gothenburg port and technical development of seafaring.
Founded: | Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

Naval Museum

Marinmuseum (Naval Museum) is Sweden"s national naval museum, dedicated to the Swedish naval defense and preservation of the country"s naval history. Marinmuseum is one of Sweden"s oldest museums, established in 1752 when King Adolf Frederick began the collection and documentation of naval objects in what was called the Model Room (Modellkammaren). He also ordered the preservation of ship models and ship bu ...
Founded: 1752 | Location: Karlskrona, Sweden

The Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum in Stockholm is the only one of its kind in the Nordic countries. The permanent exhibition displays unique objects and settings that give an account of the lives and traditions of Jews.
Founded: | Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Sigtuna Museum

Sigtuna Museum exhibits the history of Sigtuna, Sweden's oldest medieval city. The museum is located on the site where the first royal palace was built in the late 900’s AD. The museum dates back to 1916 and the current museum has been built in the 1960s with new showrooms, reception and storage. The permanent exhibition displays Sigtuna's earliest history. Although the museum is active in many areas the archaeological ...
Founded: 1916 | Location: Sigtuna, Sweden

Blekinge County Museum

Blekinge Museum is a regional museum that was founded in 1899. Since 1972 it is housed in Grevagården, one of the oldest buildings and the only remaining town farm in Karlskrona. Grevagården was completed 1705 as the home of Admiral General Count Wachtmeister, one of the founders of Karlskrona. Since Blekinge is a marked coastal county with an archipelago, the maritime heritage is a chief focus. Blekinge museum has had ...
Founded: 1899 | Location: Karlskrona, Sweden

Featured Historic Landmarks, Sites & Buildings

Historic Site of the week

Monte d'Accoddi

Monte d"Accoddi is a Neolithic archaeological site in northern Sardinia, located in the territory of Sassari. The site consists of a massive raised stone platform thought to have been an altar. It was constructed by the Ozieri culture or earlier, with the oldest parts dated to around 4,000–3,650 BC.

The site was discovered in 1954 in a field owned by the Segni family. No chambers or entrances to the mound have been found, leading to the presumption it was an altar, a temple or a step pyramid. It may have also served an observational function, as its square plan is coordinated with the cardinal points of the compass.

The initial Ozieri structure was abandoned or destroyed around 3000 BC, with traces of fire found in the archeological evidence. Around 2800 BC the remains of the original structure were completely covered with a layered mixture of earth and stone, and large blocks of limestone were then applied to establish a second platform, truncated by a step pyramid (36 m × 29 m, about 10 m in height), accessible by means of a second ramp, 42 m long, built over the older one. This second temple resembles contemporary Mesopotamian ziggurats, and is attributed to the Abealzu-Filigosa culture.

Archeological excavations from the chalcolithic Abealzu-Filigosa layers indicate the Monte d"Accoddi was used for animal sacrifice, with the remains of sheep, cattle, and swine recovered in near equal proportions. It is among the earliest known sacrificial sites in Western Europe.

The site appears to have been abandoned again around 1800 BC, at the onset of the Nuragic age.

The monument was partially reconstructed during the 1980s. It is open to the public and accessible by the old route of SS131 highway, near the hamlet of Ottava. It is 14,9 km from Sassari and 45 km from Alghero. There is no public transportation to the site. The opening times vary throughout the year.