Explore Tampa

The Glazer Children's Museum in Curtis Hixon Park, downtown Tampa, opened in 2010 in a building with a colourful façade beside the Tampa Museum of Art. Its 35,000 square feet of hands-on exhibits let children play at being firefighters, vets, pilots and shopkeepers, build, climb and experiment with water.

The Tampa Museum of Art in Curtis Hixon Park opened its current building on the Hillsborough River in 2010, an aluminium-clad box by Stanley Saitowitz that glows with LED light at night. Its collection spans Greek and Roman antiquities, one of the largest in the southeastern United States, and modern and contemporary art.

The Henry B. Plant Museum occupies the south wing of the former Tampa Bay Hotel, built in 1891 by railway magnate Henry B. Plant in Moorish Revival style with silver minarets; the rest is now the University of Tampa. Restored rooms show the hotel's Gilded Age furnishings, art and guests' life.

The Tampa Bay History Center on the Riverwalk covers 12,000 years of the region's history over three floors: its first peoples, Spanish explorers, the cigar industry of Ybor City and the growth of modern Tampa. The Touchton Map Library holds maps of Florida from five centuries, and a pirate-ship gallery shows the age of sail.

Ybor City Museum State Park tells the story of Tampa's cigar-making district, founded in 1886 by Vicente Martinez Ybor, whose Cuban, Spanish and Italian workers made it a centre of the cigar trade. The museum is in the 1923 Ferlita Bakery, beside a restored cigar worker's cottage and a garden.

MOSI, the Museum of Science and Industry in north Tampa, is a hands-on science centre founded in 1962. Its exhibits cover the human body, flight, space and weather, with a planetarium, a butterfly garden and a high-wire bicycle ride for visitors.