The 10 Weirdest Museums in the World: Underwater Experiences, Elements of Torture, Gruesome Art, and Other Quirks

This May 18 the International Museum Day, an initiative promoted by the International Council of Museums in 1977 and which aims to sensitize citizens to the importance of these spaces for memory, heritage protection and cultural exchanges.

This year, the motto chosen to commemorate it is “The future of museums: recovering and reinventing», Which invites us to reflect on how to project onto new generations the need to preserve and promote museums as one of the pillars of tomorrow’s societies, because they keep the memory of what we have advanced as ‘humanity.

As part of this celebration, here is a compilation of some of the most curious museums in the world, which may not be the biggest or the most famous, but which will surely leave you in awe of their themes, their strange objects, their unlikely places and their fascinating experiences.

1. Museum of Underwater Art: The first stop on this list isn’t exactly on land, but in Latin American waters. That’s right, on the shores of Cancun, Mexico, you can have a unique experience diving into the waters to swim in the midst of an impressive series of sculptures that have already been invaded by marine life, offering a dreamlike image. which will be recorded for you, always in the memory of its visitors. The MUSA was created to attract underwater tourism that negatively affected the biodiversity and sustainability of the Mexican seabed and transport it to a protected and safe area where corals and reefs are not damaged. As this area did not have as great an appeal as the endangered ecosystems, the sculptures which today form part of the largest underwater museum in the world were placed there.

2. Museum of the strange: Its real name is the Boonshoft Discovery Museum and it is located in Ohio (United States) but it is better known by its nickname thanks to the surprising amount of rare items it keeps inside. Here you can find a woman’s shoe destroyed by lightning, the pants of a man who had a waist of two meters in circumference, snapshots of supposed ghosts, the occasional mummy, a light bulb filled with water from a large flooding in the state. dating from 1913 or the remains of tornadoes that passed through the city.

3. Museum of bad art: MOBA (for its acronym in English) is in Boston (United States) and aims to “celebrate the work of artists whose work would not be shown or appreciated in a forum other than this one”. Its vast collection is fed in three ways: discoveries of works in the trash cans (such as Lucy in the sky with diamonds, the work that started the collection), donations from artists and bad art collectors, and flea market purchases. Its particular collections and growing popularity have created a genre of its own “bad art”. Here you can find the best of the worst in the art world.

4. Garbage can museum: This is one of those amazing and unusual places hidden in the rough streets of New York. the Garbage Museum, was founded over 30 years ago by Nelson Molina, a retired garbage collector who began the task of picking up the most unusual things he found in the garbage. Here you can see some very curious Christmas decorations, old military uniforms, typewriters, wedding figurines and all kinds of garbage that we throw away. A journey that brings us face to face with who we are, showing what we reject.

5. Museum of Broken Relationships: Change of continents, we are going to Europe, more precisely to Zagreb (Croatia) where they have built a museum dedicated to romantic failure. The objects that are on display in its hallways were once part of beautiful relationships, and others not so much, that they have come to an end. Letters, gifts, anecdotes, photos, memories, the collection is always open to new collaborations and those who visit the place can leave an object there that they want to immortalize.

6. Devil’s Museum: If the previous one was a destination for romantics, this one is for black lovers. Located in Kaunas (Lithuania), in this place you can see up to 1,700 images of the devil, as well as an endless display of objects related to Satan and cults in his name. If you are easily impressionable or have a great fear of demonic curses, this is not the place for you.

7. Crime museum: Continuing in Europe, but further west, we go to London (England) and if we can pass by this place where there is an impressive collection of deadly weapons, spy objects, a collection of medical evidence. – legal and a whole space dedicated to Jack Ripper, one of the most famous assassins in the world. The downside is that this is not a place open to the public and you need permission from Scotland Yard to enter which is usually only granted to professional criminals.

8. Museum of medieval torture: If you wanted to see terrifying objects then one of the most visited places in Prague is for you. Located next to Carlos IV point, another important tourist attraction of the city, in this museum are the instruments most used in the Middle Ages to inflict corporal punishment collected from all parts of the world, reminding us that torture was more current justice “And obtain confessions of crimes in the ancient world.

9. Leprosy Museum: This museum is actually two, one in Bergen (Norway) and the other in Münster (Germany), and they commemorate one of the greatest diseases that struck mankind and which decimated the population at different periods of history. Visiting these places, in this time of pandemic, can help us remember what we have been through before and how we have triumphed.

10. Sock Museum: To close this list we are going to Tokyo (Japan) in a place built to exalt this essential but little-known article of clothing, the sock. Here you can find more than 20 thousand of these clothes in all sizes, colors and shapes, a real ode to human creativity and ingenuity, and clearly, below.

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