Explore Oslo

The Nobel Peace Center is the museum of the Nobel Peace Prize, opened in 2005 in the former Oslo West railway station on the City Hall Square. Its exhibitions present Alfred Nobel, the peace laureates since 1901 and themes of war, peace and dialogue, and each December a new exhibition about that year's laureate opens.

The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design holds the Norwegian state's collections of art and design, formed in 2003 from five museums including the National Gallery. Its building at Vestbanen by the harbour opened in 2022; the galleries run from older art and crafts to contemporary works and include Edvard Munch's 1893 painting The Scream.

Norway's Resistance Museum occupies the Double Battery, a building from about 1691 at Akershus Fortress. Opened by Crown Prince Harald in May 1970, it follows the German occupation of Norway from the invasion of 9 April 1940 to the liberation in May 1945 in a chronological display of weapons, radio sets, sabotage equipment, documents, photographs and models.

The Astrup Fearnley Museum is a private museum of contemporary art, founded in 1993 and housed since 2012 in two buildings by Renzo Piano on Tjuvholmen, set on either side of a canal under a curved glass roof. One building shows changing exhibitions, the other a rotating selection from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, with works by Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst.

MUNCH is the museum of the painter Edvard Munch, who left his works to the City of Oslo. It opened in 1963 at Tøyen and moved in 2021 to a 13-storey tower in Bjørvika designed by estudio Herreros. Its galleries show paintings, prints and drawings from the collection, including versions of The Scream, alongside temporary exhibitions.

The Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo stands at Tøyen inside the University Botanical Garden, which was founded in 1814. Its stone exhibition buildings from the early 20th century show Norwegian and foreign wildlife, minerals and fossils, including the 47-million-year-old primate fossil known as Ida, while the garden holds around 7,500 plant species.

The Fram Museum on the Bygdøy peninsula opened in 1936 around the polar ship Fram, built by Colin Archer for Fridtjof Nansen and later sailed by Otto Sverdrup and Roald Amundsen. Visitors can go aboard and below deck; a second hall holds Gjøa, the first ship to sail through the Northwest Passage, with exhibitions on Arctic and Antarctic expeditions.

The Kon-Tiki Museum on Bygdøynes holds the vessels of Thor Heyerdahl's expeditions: the balsa raft Kon-Tiki, on which he sailed from Peru to Polynesia in 1947, and the reed boat Ra II, which crossed the Atlantic from Morocco in 1970. Opened in 1949, it also shows finds from Easter Island and a whale shark model beneath the raft.

The Norwegian Maritime Museum stands on the shore at Bygdøynes, next to the Fram and Kon-Tiki museums, in brick buildings opened in 1958 and 1960. Founded in 1914 and known until 2010 as Norsk Sjøfartsmuseum, it covers Norwegian shipping, coastal life and marine archaeology, with traditional boats, ship models, maritime paintings and finds from wrecks.

Norsk Folkemuseum on Bygdøy is a museum of cultural history whose open-air section holds more than 150 buildings moved from towns and rural districts across Norway. Among them are Gol Stave Church, dated to around 1200, a Setesdal farmstead, a Sámi site and an old town quarter; indoor exhibitions cover folk dress, folk art and Sámi culture.