Discover Your Connection to the Natural World
Housed in the oldest museum building in Amsterdam, constructed between 1852 and 1855, the ARTIS-Groote Museum is one of the city’s most extraordinary cultural destinations — and one of its best kept secrets. After remaining closed to the public for 75 years, the building underwent a complete sustainable renovation and reopened in May 2022 as something genuinely unlike anything else in the Netherlands.
This is not a conventional natural history museum. At ARTIS-Groote, you are invited to discover how humans, animals, plants, and microbes share a single ecosystem — and how crucial the role you, as a human being, play in it. The result is an experience that is as thought-provoking as it is deeply personal.
Nature, Seen Differently
The museum takes you on a personal expedition, exploring how nature cooperates through a thousand small and large examples. Did you know that trees communicate with each other, just like neighbours? Or that babies move like crocodiles? These are the kinds of revelations that await at every turn — surprising, illuminating, and quietly humbling.
Art, sounds, smells, and interactive installations combine to move visitors and help them understand their connection with nature in an entirely new way. This is not a museum you walk through passively — it is one that pulls you in, challenges your assumptions, and sends you back out into the world seeing things differently.
The museum is the result of a collaboration between a team of 50 scientists, experts, and artists, and that breadth of perspective shows in every room. Science and creativity are woven together seamlessly, making complex ideas about biodiversity and ecosystems feel immediate, relevant, and deeply human.
Worth the Visit
ARTIS-Groote Museum is the kind of place that surprises you — and then stays with you. Whether you visit as part of a trip to the wider ARTIS zoo or make the journey especially, it offers something rare: a museum experience that reminds you, in the most vivid and engaging way possible, that you are not separate from nature. You are part of it.
