Europe’s Best Museums? They Have a Type.

What are the best museums and sights in Europe? Or, more specifically, what are the best types of sights?

I’m wrapping up guidebook research after spending 10 weeks on the road, split over three trips in Spain, Morocco, England, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Looking back, I realize that most of my favorite sightseeing experiences fall into a few categories that go beyond the predictable churches, castles, monuments, and big-name art museums. And so, I brainstormed this admittedly subjective list: not just a roundup of my personal favorite sightseeing in 2025, but also a broad-strokes look at five categories of sights that I find especially rewarding.

Whether you’re planning a trip to these destinations, or looking for inspiration for a trip anywhere, I hope these “types of sights” encourage you to consider some attractions that might, at first glance, be easy to overlook — but that merit some of your limited time.

1. The Endearing Local History Museum

In the sweet town of Keswick, deep in England’s bucolic Lake District, there are two options for a rainy day: Hike and get wet… or find something indoors. I opted for the latter and visited the Keswick Museum, which fills a historic Arts and Crafts-style hall in a lush park. I was unexpectedly charmed by how this place harnesses a chipper community spirit to make the story of this small town surprisingly engaging.

While modest, the Keswick Museum is more than the sum of its parts. It features a well-curated assortment of local artifacts, from a surveyor’s gigantic 1825 relief map of the Lake District (suspended on the wall) to a variety of items relating to the flourishing of Keswick as a tourist destination (including the earliest known guidebook to the town, from the early 1910s). The highlight? “Musical stones”: naturally resonant chunks of slate that someone has whittled down to the perfect tone, then set up as a xylophone for playing tunes. There’s also a gallery where museum volunteers take turns researching and installing their own temporary exhibits. How delightful!

Sure, they ain’t the Louvre or the Prado. But wonderful local history museums around Europe, when done well, can really bring a place vividly to life. Some, like Keswick, are in small towns or even villages. One of my favorites is the Herring Era Museum in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, which explains how that little fish revolutionized not only the local economy, but made Iceland a financially viable independent nation. I’ve also enjoyed the one in Zermatt, Switzerland; the scrappy hilltop museum on the isle of Folegandros, Greece; and the Appenzell regional museums in the towns of Appenzell, Stein, and Urnäsch, Switzerland.

Others are in big cities, designed to help visitors get their heads around the local identity and the role that place played in the story of Europe. Excellent ones are in Zagreb, Croatia; Lausanne, Switzerland; Liverpool and Bristol, England; the Bryggen Museum in Bergen, Norway; the Musée Basque in Bayonne; and the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, Scotland.

2. The Single-Artist Museum

While wide-ranging art museums can be delightful, I find myself especially drawn to a museum devoted entirely to one artist, often displayed in the home in which they actually lived. In England’s Lake District, William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage and Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm both had me imagining the writer hunched over a desk, creating their masterpieces.

In Hungary’s Szentendre — just up the Danube from Budapest — I enjoyed getting to know the expressive, poignant sculptures of Margit Kovács.

In Córdoba and Ronda, Spain, I marveled at the works of two talented artists I’d never heard of before: Julio Romero de Torres and Joaquín Peinado, respectively.

On past trips to France, Albi’s Toulouse-Lautrec Museum deepened my appreciation of the works of an artist I only thought I was familiar with. And the former home of Claude Monet in Giverny, France, is a pilgrimage for lovers of his works, who stroll through the lily-padded gardens that inspired him.

The best example I visited in 2025 (and one of the best anywhere) is the National Trust’s tours of the childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. After meeting at a suburban Liverpool train station, your small group hops on a minibus for the short drive to each house, where you’re welcomed by an impressively well-versed docent who does an insightful intro chat, then sets you free to roam the same halls, kitchens, bedrooms, and loos where two of history’s greatest songwriters spent their formative years. Not really a Beatles fan? The homes also provide wonderful social-historical insights into the everyday lives of working-class Liverpudlians in the 1950s. This remarkable experience combines being in proximity to tangible details — the pinups over John’s boyhood bed, the well-worn piano in Paul’s living room — with gaining a strikingly intimate understanding of two boys, becoming young men, who would change the world. For example, I learned that both Paul and John had lost their mothers at a very young age — perhaps providing them with an unspoken kinship that sustained their fruitful, fitful collaboration.

Another mind-blowing “one artist” museum I visited this year was the Robert Capa Center in Budapest, Hungary. I knew little about the Budapest-born photographer, but after spending an hour and a half here, I am a fan. Like a mid-20th-century Forrest Gump, Robert Capa traveled the world during one of its most tumultuous eras — documenting the Spanish Civil War, the First Sino-Japanese War, the Allied campaigns in North Africa and Sicily, the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach, the liberation of France, the creation of Israel, and the early days of postwar communism in Hungary and the USSR. He also snapped intimate slice-of-life portraits of Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Ingmar Bergman, and many others. The museum displays Capa’s most iconic images and tells the improbable life story of this eyewitness to history.

My all-time-favorite “one artist” home is devoted to an architect that many have never heard of: Jože Plečnik, who reshaped the Slovenian capital (and his hometown), Ljubljana, and also carried out major works in Prague, Vienna, and other cities. Still furnished with unique, Plečnik-designed furniture, one-of-a-kind inventions, and favorite souvenirs from his travels, the Jože Plečnik House paints an indelible and unusually intimate portrait of an artist.

Yet more “one artist” museums to consider around Europe: the Seidel Photo Studio Museum, in the Czech town of Český Krumlov; the Rodin Museum in Paris; the Salvador Dalí sights outside of Barcelona (Cadaqués and Figueres); the Ivan Meštrović Museum in Split, Croatia; the Charles Rennie Mackintosh House at Glasgow University in Scotland; the Rembrandt House Museums in both Amsterdam and Leiden, Netherlands; the Hans Christian Andersen House in Odense, Denmark; the Mozart sights in Salzburg, Austria; the Albrecht Dürer homes in Nürnberg and Wittenberg, Germany; Edvard Grieg’s Troldhaugen, just outside of Bergen, Norway; and The Secession in Vienna, with its Gustav Klimt paintings and distinctive “golden cabbage” dome.

3. The Single-Topic “Deep Dive” Museum

Some museums are a mile wide and an inch deep — trying to cover too much territory and doing none of it well. Many of my favorites take precisely the opposite approach: going all-in on a single, extremely narrow topic, probing the depths of all its fascinating details. (Of course, you could put most of the “single artist” museums, above, into this category as well.)

One of the best in this vein is the magnificent Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. The entire museum is literally and thematically built around a single item: the massive warship Vasa, which sunk to the bottom of Stockholm Harbor 40 minutes into her 1628 maiden voyage. More than three centuries later, the ship was rediscovered, raised from the deep, refurbished, and became the centerpiece of a state-of-the-art museum that tells the whole story and gets you prow-to-prow with the Vasa herself.

This summer, in charming Ribe, Denmark, I stumbled upon a museum devoted to hometown boy Jacob Riis (1849-1914). Despite the ticket-seller’s assertion that Riis was the most important Danish-American of all time, I was embarrassed to admit that I knew nothing about him. The exhibit set me straight, eloquently telling the tale of this Danish émigré who documented the plight of the desperately poor — mostly immigrants — who lived in the squalor of New York City’s tenements (and eventually published a seminal exposé, How the Other Half Lives). It was inspiring to learn how, by harnessing and pioneering the rapidly evolving medium of photojournalism, Riis brought about reforms that improved the wretched lives of the people he documented. Riis also became close friends with President Theodore Roosevelt, who called him both “the most useful citizen of New York” and “the ideal American.”

Sometimes that “single topic” is unexpected, even startling. The Museum of Broken Relationships, in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, displays a variety of items that each come with a complicated story of a now-defunct relationship — from a love-at-first-sight romance that burned out, to the loss of a dear friend or parent, to becoming disillusioned with a favorite politician. Touching, witty, and incredibly human, this museum is a good reminder to take a chance on sights that may seem quirky at first blush.

Thinking back on other examples of the “deep dive” style of museum, I realize the Netherlands is particularly adept at this approach: In Amsterdam, you have the famous Anne Frank House, of course, but also a Pipe Museum, a Houseboat Museum, and a Museum of Canals, while nearby Leiden has the Pilgrim Museum. Ireland also has a knack for these, from the Irish Wake Museum in Waterford to the Irish National Famine Museum in Strokestown to 14 Henrietta Street in Dublin; the Titanic Belfast Museum straddles this category and the next one. Others to watch for: the Paris Sewer Museum; the Viking ship museums in both Oslo, Norway, and Roskilde, Denmark (plus Oslo’s Kon-Tiki Museum); the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels; the Olympics Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland; and some that are just plain bizarre, including the Phallological (Penis) Museum in Reykjavík and the Currywurst Museum in Berlin.

4. The High-Tech History Museum

Increasingly, history museums employ clever, high-tech innovations — location-sensing audioguides, sound and lighting effects, wrap-around films, interactive features — to bring to life a complicated or murky bit of history. Frankly, I’m on the fence about this trend: All too often, the whiz-bang gizmos act as a crutch, distracting from the thinness of the actual information. But when combined with impressive artifacts, compelling storytelling, and a clear point of view, these high-tech history museums can be mind-blowing.

Case in point: This summer I toured the stunning Moesgård Museum, just outside of Aarhus, Denmark. The museum was long famous as the home of the Grauballe Man, a remarkably well-preserved Iron Age corpse that was discovered in a nearby peat bog. In 2014, the Moesgård opened a gigantic new purpose-built building with a mission as grandiose as its architecture: combining astonishing artifacts — from prehistoric stone tools and mysterious barrows, to the Grauballe Man, to a perfectly preserved Viking boat — with evocative storytelling and high-tech methodology to create a powerful experience that kindles an appreciation not only for the story of prehistoric peoples in Jutland, but for human evolution in broad strokes. There are also two sprawling galleries hosting temporary exhibits that are at least as good as the permanent one. It instantly became one of my favorite museums, anywhere.

Another favorite is the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (POLIN), in Warsaw, Poland. Built on the site of the onetime Jewish quarter, POLIN is architecturally striking in itself. Inside, it employs a combination of thoughtful storytelling and state-of-the-art presentation to make the absolute most of the scant few artifacts that survive from what was once a flourishing culture. While so many Jewish-themed sights around Europe focus narrowly on the Holocaust, POLIN takes an expansive and enlightening approach to the entire Jewish experience in Poland.

Many of these high-tech history museums focus on one historical era — often World War II, including the Caen Memorial Museum in Normandy, France; the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland; and the Uprising Museum in Warsaw. The museum at the Culloden Battlefield, just outside of Inverness, Scotland, is one of the best of this type. Others are broader in their focus, including the German History Museum in Berlin and the Landesmuseum (Swiss National Museum) in Zürich. And some of the museums described earlier (including the Vasa Museum) could slip into this category, as well.

Artifacts; storytelling; high-tech exhibits: A museum that does all three equally well is rare. But when they hit — they really hit.

5. The Cross-Cultural Structure

Europe’s epic history is the story of successive civilizations layering one upon the other. Often, while a few artifacts survive from centuries past, most of what you see today dates from one or two discrete historical periods. But a few sights manage to capture a broader swath of history in stone, by simultaneously embodying starkly different civilizations in one cohesive structure.

The prime example of this is one of my favorite sights in all of Europe: the Mezquita in Córdoba, Spain. This gigantic structure — a massive box, 400 feet by 600 feet — began as a low-lying Moorish-style mosque, built around 785. Strolling through seemingly endless rows of 800 columns (spanned by graceful double arches), you feel you’ve stepped back to the age of Al-Andalus, when Córdoba was the capital of a sprawling Muslim realm.

But then you turn a corner and — bam! — you’re transported into an entirely different time and place: a towering 16th-century Catholic Baroque cathedral, stretching 130 feet into the air, that was built within that original mosque.

In Split, Croatia, the entire town center (filling the former halls of a Roman palace) gives you this same sensation of “layers of history” — especially the cathedral that sits upon Peristyle Square. The hulking, octagonal hall that forms the core of this building was originally the mausoleum for the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who was born nearby, retired right here, and notoriously tortured many Christians. But the frilly Venetian-style bell tower — and the rich golden decor inside — make it clear that those pagan Romans were soon supplanted by the Catholic Venetians, and later Croatians, who retrofitted Split to their own specifications.

In Pécs, Hungary, the main square is topped by another such structure. The Gazi Kasim Pasha Mosque — originally built during a period of Ottoman control in the 1540s — was later turned into a Catholic parish church (the Church of the Blessed Virgin). Today, its classic mosque architecture is still evident, and upon stepping inside, you observe a hybrid of Muslim and Catholic symbols and styles: striped arches over windows; a large prayer niche (mihrab) with a crucifixion above it; colorful Islamic-style stalactite decorations; and dome paintings that combine Christian angels with the geometric designs of Islam. On the wall is a verse from the Quran, translated into Hungarian and used for Christian worship — a reminder that, as fellow “people of the book,” Muslims and Christians share many of the same foundational principles.

Tangier — Morocco’s closest point to Europe — is another prime spot for these “cultural hybrid” sights. Just off the main square, you escape from the bustle of rumbling delivery vans and buzzing motor scooters into the tranquil garden courtyard surrounding St. Andrew’s Anglican Church — built on land that the sultan offered as a gift to Queen Victoria. There you’re greeted by gregarious Yassin, who wishes “peace be upon you” as he explains how, while the church’s architecture is mostly Islamic, it’s Christian in spirit: The Lord’s Prayer rings the arch in Arabic, as verses of the Quran would in a mosque.

Sometimes it’s not a building but a location. In the heart of old Sarajevo, at the precise point where Sarači street becomes Ferhadija street, you can look in one direction and swear you were in Istanbul, with its cobbles and market stalls; looking the other way, you could easily be in Vienna, with broad pedestrian boulevards and grand Austrian-style architecture.

And speaking of Istanbul, the ultimate example of a “cross-cultural” sight surely must be the Hagia Sophia: an early Christian church, later turned into a mosque, so influential that it became a template for many other mosques across the Ottoman Empire (including the one in today’s Pécs).

All of these sights are a reminder of the full complexity of Europe’s story — and of how few of those layers we actually see in our everyday travels… until we go looking for them.

---

What are some of your favorite museums in these categories? Or do you have favorite “categories” of sightseeing that I’m overlooking? Share your thoughts in the Comments.

Of course, all of the sights mentioned here — and so many more — are described in detail in our Rick Steves guidebooks.

If you’d like to hear more about my 2025 travels, join me on Zoom Monday, November 10 at 6 p.m. Pacific Time (that’s 9 p.m. Eastern) when I’ll be doing a virtual “Trip Report” for Monday Night Travel. It’s free, as long as you sign up in advance.