Frilandsmuseet (The Open Air Museum), opened in 1897 and covering 40 hectares, it is one of the largest and oldest open-air museums in the world. It is a department under the Danish National Museum. The museum features more than 100 buildings from rural environments and dating from 1650-1950. All buildings are original and have been moved piece by piece from their original location save a windmill that is still found in its original location.
The museum contains rural buildings from all regions of Denmark, including many of the small and remote Danish islands like Bornholm, Læsø. Represented are also buildings from the Faroe Islands, as well as the former Danish possessions of Southern Schleswig in Germany and Scania andHalland in Sweden. The distribution demonstrates how life has been adapted to regional living conditions and availability of materials. Buildings include a farmhouse from the island of læsø thatched with kelp
Represented in the collection are also all social living conditions, from a manor house to a poorhouse, different types of buildings like farms, mills and workshops, and numerous professions. The museum include six mills including a post mill from 1662. Some of the mills are regularly operated by a guild of volunteers.
The grounds of the museum also features 25 historic gardens and cultural landscapes and livestock of old Danish breeds. The gardens and animals are displayed in connection with the socially and geographically corresponding buildings.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.