55
Countries with the most museums in the world (2021)
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
55 points (91.0% liked)
History
6825 readers
37 users here now
Welcome to History!
A community dedicated to sharing and discussing fascinating historical facts from all periods and regions.
Rules:
-
Post about history. Ask a question about the past, share a link to an article about something historical, or talk about something related to history that interests you. Discussion is encouraged.
-
No memes. No ads. No promos. No politics. No spam.
-
No porn.
-
We like facts and reliable sources here. While sources like Quora/Reddit/Wikipedia can be great tools for quick searches, we do not allow such user-generated content as primary source. What’s wrong with Wikipedia?
NOTE: Personal attacks and insults will not be tolerated. Stick to talking about the historical topic at hand in your comments. Insults and personal attacks will get you an immediate ban.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Wiki: As of 2018, there are 19,495 incorporated cities, towns and villages in the United States. 14,768 of these have populations below 5,000
And 30k museums? I doubt this information.
The USA has the world record for the most museums.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/781353-most-museums-country
And if you want raw data, check out this PDF:
https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/museum_data_file_documentation_and_users_guide.pdf
Would you believe the list on Wikipedia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_in_the_United_States
You doubting the truth does not make it any less true.
I live in a very small town in the USA (~300 people), and we don't have a single museum. But I can drive to what counts as a "city" here, and visit 2 art museums, a science museum, and a history museum.
There are 53 museums within driving distance of my home.
Also, this is the raw number of museums, and the US has a large population.
The US has about four times as many people as Germany, and about 5 times as many museums. If you control for population, it doesn't seem so weird.
What's weird is that China has so few museums, and India doesn't even make the list.
this was my first thought. per capita would make more sense but then also like some people above where talking about museums and yeah there are like large city type museums and there are much smaller ones. My town has a historical society that basically runs a museum of the towns past but it would like fit in a large condo. Now the major city downtown has an art, natural history, science and industry, planetarium that are places people travel to see and our in buildings you can spend a whole day at and not see everything plus equaly interesting grounds. So there are museums and then there are museums.
I wondered about that myself a country as old and as large as China seems like it should have a huge number of them
China was old. Then the „cultural revolution“ made BRRRRR so now most of China isn‘t very old anymore.
Nobody seriously doubts the numbers. What we doubt is that "Johns Donut Museum" & co belong on such lists.
Seriously. I scrolled randomly through a list, stopped and saw "Bangor Police Museum". I don't think you really need a museum for the police force of some random-ass city that didn't even exist 200 years ago
It's nice someone keeps track of their history though. Not saying it'd likely consider it a museum though.
Oh yeah archiving is very important. Here we have local archives for basically everything relevant they can put their hands on. For a funny contrast with my example above, my hometown is more than 1000 years old and only has a museum dedicated to the few famous painters that lived there for a while.
Now that I think about it it's very much possible that the oldest parts of my parents' house are older than the city of Bangor
The big cities are the Spiders Georg of museum distribution, though. There are hundreds each in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.
That's just 1.5 museums per town. Tiny towns have tiny museums. Like a small town i went to once had a "lock and key" museum and it was just the history of locks and keys. Very niche, pretty small. I think they weirdly also had like history of telephones and maybe record players in there? Like a decade ago, so i can't remember.
But also, most actual cities have multiple museums, or even over a dozen, so a lot of small towns don't need any to make it to 30k.
So nominally 2 per town/city.
I grew up near a "city" of 50,000 people, and there were at least half a dozen museums there. I know I visited several of them in grade school, so there's likely more I didn't know about, and there's likely more today.
Then there's places like DC, which has museums everywhere.
I recently did a road trip across half the US - pretty much every small town I stopped in had a museum of some sort.
I now live in the 'burbs of a city with a metro population around 5 million. There are half a dozen museums within a 15 minute drive that I personally know of (they're on my list of places to visit), this without going into the city itself.
I doubt it as well, but it makes me think that, in the Netherlands, museums get significant tax benefits, so a lot of shops are also “museums” to get the benefits. Maybe that would partially explain the bloated number?
Sounds plausible, actually. Some of those museums might be just a rusted rifle on the bar wall.
The South built a lot of museums to highlight the "war of Northern aggression". And yeah, many of them are in bars and a wall in city hall.
Every American hoarder considers themselves having a "museum". So a town with 3 hoarders would have 3 museums. Would they be considered museums anywhere else in the world? No. But that's America, they think pedophiles are good people to run a country.