Oslo is home to some wonderful museums, the perfect place to escape when the weather is less than ideal, a relatively common occurrence… Even in summer most are only open 10-4 though so it can be tricky to fit them in. The Oslo Card is worth getting if you plan on visiting more than three museums in a day.

The National Museum is a good place to start, a vast new museum which opened in 2022 to display some of the ~400,000 item collection. You could easily spend half a day or more here, there is so much to see. Everything is beautifully displayed. It is usually difficult to photograph well things behind glass but here the lighting is excellent. Downstairs it starts with their collection of ancient objects.

Before moving into the medieval period.

There are some very cool clothes on display, including those belonging to Norway’s two Queens.

The rest of the ground floor is filled with all manner of objects.

Upstairs is their huge art collection, from the classic to the modern, which was of variable interest to me, though I was exhausted from taking in the contents of the ground floor.

The Naturhistorick Museum was also surprisingly large, with three buildings. One houses the recently renovated geological-paleontological collection, with plenty of dinosaurs, and a large mineral collection upstairs.

One houses a rather sparse amount of information on climate change, and the third houses the Zoological Collection, a paradise for those who like stuffed animals.

The Vigeland Museum is close to Vigeland Park, and where the original designs for many of the park sculptures can be found, in the sculptors home and studio.

The Historick Museum was the only underwhelming museum I visited in Oslo, with a poorly displayed and captioned Viking collection, and equally sparse displays of other objects from their collections.

They did have a wonderful exhibition on samurai though, which was the clear highlight for me.

The Norway Resistance Museum was a traditional but interesting place, telling the story of the invasion of Norway by the Nazis in WW2, the resistance against them, and their eventual defeat.

To finish with the prominent Akershus Fortress, a medieval castle renovated in the 17th century. It was more impressive inside than I was expecting, with a number of attractive rooms pleasingly quiet at the end of the day.