The 25 Best Museums in the World, From Bogotá to the Acropolis

Which museums are worth crossing the world for? This list of 25 was put together in 2015 and ranks favourites from six continents, counting down to the Acropolis Museum in Athens at number one. The original ranking did not name its source, and it closely resembles the traveller-review rankings that sites such as TripAdvisor publish every year, so read it as one well-informed selection rather than an official measure. It mixes giant encyclopedic collections like the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art with places you might not expect: a garden of contemporary art in the Brazilian forest, a 17th-century warship in Stockholm and a gold collection that inspired the legend of El Dorado.

For each museum you will find what makes it special, a few key facts and, where things have changed since 2015, an update. The order is the original countdown. Opening hours, ticket prices and gallery closures change often, so check the official website before you go, especially for museums that were under renovation in recent years.

Numbers 25 to 19: gold, treasures and a buried army

25. Gold Museum (Museo del Oro), Bogotá

Run by Colombia’s central bank since 1939, the Museo del Oro holds around 55,000 objects and is often described as the largest collection of pre-Hispanic goldwork in the world. Its star is the Muisca Raft, a small gold offering found in 1969 near Pasca that shows a new ruler’s ceremony linked to the El Dorado legend. The pieces show that for the region’s Indigenous peoples gold had spiritual meaning more than monetary value.

24. Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

New Zealand’s national museum opened in 1998 by merging the national museum and art gallery, and its Māori name is usually translated as “container of treasures”. It is run on a bicultural principle rooted in the Treaty of Waitangi and has its own working marae, Rongomaraeroa. Visitors often head first for the colossal squid, the largest specimen of its kind ever recovered. Entry is free for New Zealanders, while international visitors have paid an admission fee since 2024.

23. Inhotim, Brumadinho (Brazil)

About 60 km from Belo Horizonte, Inhotim combines a contemporary art museum with a botanical garden of some 5,000 plant species. Former mining magnate Bernardo Paz built it on his estate and opened it to the public in 2006; today roughly two dozen pavilions show more than 500 works by Brazilian and international artists. Paz was convicted of money laundering in 2017, a verdict overturned in 2020, and the institute continues to operate as a nonprofit.

22. Terracotta Army, Xi’an

On 29 March 1974 farmers digging a well near Xi’an found fragments of clay soldiers, and archaeologists went on to uncover one of the great finds of the 20th century. The figures were buried around 210–209 BC with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, and estimates put the total at more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots and hundreds of horses, most still underground. Each face was individually finished, and the figures were once brightly painted. The mausoleum has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

21. National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.

The Smithsonian’s flagship for flight opened on the National Mall in 1976 and displays the 1903 Wright Flyer, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and the Apollo 11 command module Columbia. A huge companion site, the Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport, opened in 2003. The Mall building has been under a multi-year renovation since 2018, with galleries reopening in stages, so check what is open before you visit.

20. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Dutch national museum was founded in The Hague in 1800 and moved to Amsterdam in 1808, settling in its grand building on Museumplein in 1885. It is the place to see Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Vermeer’s The Milkmaid and works by Frans Hals, along with Delftware, ship models and an Asian pavilion. A ten-year renovation ended with a grand reopening in 2013.

19. The Louvre, Paris

The Louvre began as a fortress built by King Philip II in the late 12th century to defend Paris from the west, not, as is often said, to keep out Vikings; remains of its walls can still be seen in the basement. It opened as a public museum on 10 August 1793 and is now the most visited museum on Earth, with around 35,000 works on display, among them the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. In October 2025 thieves stole eight pieces of the French crown jewels from the Galerie d’Apollon in a daytime raid.

Numbers 18 to 13: villas, castles and a warship

18. Galleria Borghese, Rome

Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V, built this villa in the early 1600s to show off a collection that is still one of the finest in Rome. It holds Bernini’s marble masterpieces such as Apollo and Daphne, a strong group of Caravaggio paintings including Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. Visits are limited to timed slots, so booking ahead is essential.

17. Instituto Ricardo Brennand, Recife (Brazil)

Collector and industrialist Ricardo Brennand opened this private cultural institute in 2002 in a Tudor-style castle surrounded by parkland. It holds nearly 3,000 pieces of arms and armour, a library of more than 62,000 items and the world’s largest group of paintings by Frans Post, the Dutch artist who painted colonial Brazil in the 17th century. Brennand died in 2020; his garden still includes a cast of Rodin’s The Thinker.

16. Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

Completed in 537 under the Byzantine emperor Justinian, Hagia Sophia was the cathedral of Constantinople and the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate for most of the next nine centuries, then a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453. It became a museum in 1935, which is how it appeared on this 2015 list. In July 2020 a Turkish court ruling and presidential decree turned it back into a mosque, a decision criticised by Greece, UNESCO and many Christian churches; it remains open to visitors outside prayer times.

15. The British Museum, London

Founded by an Act of Parliament in 1753 around the collection of physician Sir Hans Sloane, the museum first opened to the public in 1759 and now holds about 8 million objects. Highlights include the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian mummies, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the Parthenon sculptures removed by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s, which Greece has long asked to be returned. Entry to the permanent collection is free.

14. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Financier Andrew W. Mellon gave his collection and the money for the building, and Congress established the gallery in 1937 for the American people; entry is free. It traces Western art from the Middle Ages to today and holds Ginevra de’ Benci, the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci on public view in the Americas. The East Building, designed by I. M. Pei, houses modern art, and an outdoor sculpture garden sits beside it on the Mall.

13. Vasa Museum, Stockholm

The warship Vasa sank in Stockholm harbour on her maiden voyage in 1628 and lay in the mud for more than three centuries before being raised in 1961. Preserved with polyethylene glycol, she is the only almost fully intact 17th-century ship ever salvaged, and the purpose-built museum around her opened in 1990. With well over a million visitors a year, it is one of Scandinavia’s most visited museums.

Numbers 12 to 7: national treasures and memory

12. The National Gallery, London

Founded in 1824 and housed on Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery holds more than 2,300 paintings from the 13th century to 1900, owned by the public and free to see. It is the home of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. It is consistently among the most visited art museums in the world.

11. The National WWII Museum, New Orleans

Opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum, it was later designated by Congress as America’s national museum of the Second World War and is affiliated with the Smithsonian. It is in New Orleans because of Andrew Higgins, whose company built the landing craft used on D-Day. Oral histories from veterans and immersive galleries on the war in Europe and the Pacific make it one of the most emotional visits on this list.

10. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Israel’s official Holocaust memorial was established by law in 1953 on the Mount of Remembrance and covers about 45 acres. Its Holocaust History Museum, designed by Moshe Safdie, opened in 2005 and ends in the Hall of Names, where 600 photographs of victims look down over archives holding millions of Pages of Testimony. The Garden of the Righteous honours non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews, and admission is free.

9. Museo del Prado, Madrid

Opened in 1819, Spain’s national art museum grew out of the royal collections and is the best place in the world to see Velázquez, Goya and El Greco. Must-sees include Las Meninas, Goya’s dark “Black Paintings” and Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Its holdings run to around 8,000 paintings, of which only a portion is on display at any time.

8. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Founded in 1870, the Met on Fifth Avenue is the largest art museum in the United States and holds more than two million works spanning about 5,000 years. Within one visit you can walk through the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, European masterpieces, arms and armour, Islamic art and modern galleries. Its satellite, The Cloisters in northern Manhattan, focuses on medieval Europe.

7. Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Housed in a Beaux-Arts railway station built for the 1900 World’s Fair, the Musée d’Orsay opened in 1986 and covers French art from 1848 to 1914. It has the world’s largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, by Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne and Van Gogh among others. The great station clock, which you can look through towards the Seine, is a favourite photo spot.

Numbers 6 to 1: David, the Hermitage and the Acropolis

6. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence

Most visitors come for one work: Michelangelo’s David, carved between 1501 and 1504 and moved indoors here in 1873 to protect it from the weather. The gallery also shows his unfinished Prisoners, whose figures seem to struggle out of the stone, and a collection of Florentine paintings and musical instruments. Despite the name, it is separate from Florence’s Academy of Fine Arts next door.

5. Getty Center, Los Angeles

Designed by architect Richard Meier and opened in 1997, the Getty Center sits on a hill above Brentwood, reached by a small tram. Its collection includes Van Gogh’s Irises alongside European paintings, drawings, photographs and decorative arts, and its Central Garden is an artwork in its own right. Many galleries use computer-controlled skylights so paintings can be seen in natural light, and general admission is free.

4. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

Catherine the Great started the collection in 1764 by buying a group of paintings from a Berlin merchant, and the museum opened to the public in 1852. Today it holds more than 3 million items across six historic buildings, including the Winter Palace, the former home of the Russian tsars. Treasures include works by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna Litta and the golden Peacock Clock.

3. National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City

Opened in 1964 in Chapultepec Park, this museum by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez is famous for its courtyard umbrella, a vast roof supported by a single column. It has the world’s largest collection of ancient Mexican art, including the Aztec Sun Stone and treasures of the Maya, Olmec and Teotihuacan cultures. The upper floor covers the living Indigenous peoples of Mexico today.

2. Art Institute of Chicago

Founded in 1879 and housed since 1893 in a building on Michigan Avenue guarded by two bronze lions, the Art Institute is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the US. Its collection of nearly 300,000 works includes Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Hopper’s Nighthawks and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Renzo Piano’s Modern Wing, opened in 2009, made it the second-largest art museum in the country.

1. Acropolis Museum, Athens

Designed by Bernard Tschumi with Greek architect Michael Photiadis, the Acropolis Museum opened on 20 June 2009 at the foot of the Acropolis and shows more than 4,000 objects found on and around the rock. Glass floors let visitors look down on an excavated ancient Athenian neighbourhood, opened for walking tours in 2019. The top-floor Parthenon Gallery is aligned with the temple itself, and its frieze is displayed in its original order with spaces left for the sculptures still held in London.

What changed since 2015

A decade on, most of these museums remain fixtures of world rankings, but several have changed in ways visitors should know about:

Hagia Sophia is no longer a museum; it has functioned as a mosque since July 2020.
The Louvre was hit by the October 2025 crown-jewels theft and announced a major overhaul in 2026, including new space for the Mona Lisa.
The National Air and Space Museum has been reopening galleries in stages after its renovation.
Te Papa now charges admission to international visitors.
The Hermitage has become far harder for many foreign travellers to visit because of travel restrictions and sanctions following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Tips for visiting the world’s great museums

Big museums reward a plan. Pick a handful of works or galleries you really want to see rather than trying to cover everything, and go early on a weekday when crowds are thinner. Many museums on this list, including the British Museum, the National Gallery in London, Washington’s Smithsonian museums and Yad Vashem, are free, while others such as the Galleria Borghese require timed tickets booked in advance.

It also helps to read a little before you go. Knowing why the Parthenon frieze is split between Athens and London, or how a gold raft connects to the El Dorado legend, turns a walk past glass cases into a story you will remember.

Sources: Museum facts checked against Gold Museum, Bogotá, Te Papa, Inhotim, Terracotta Army, National Air and Space Museum, Louvre, Ricardo Brennand Institute, British Museum, Vasa Museum, Yad Vashem, Hermitage Museum, Art Institute of Chicago and Acropolis Museum (all Wikipedia). Photographs as originally published with the 2015 list.

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