Every Museum on Earth

What the colours mean

At a world view, the colours are about density— each cluster is tinted by how many museums it contains, from a cool teal lone museum up through green, blue, gold and amber to a blazing red where hundreds gather. That is the headline: where the world keeps its museums. Zoom in and the clusters break into single dots, and those switch to telling you the kind of museum. Below is how the 66,420museums that fall under a country break down by theme — more than half are catalogued simply as “a museum”, which is exactly why density, not theme, leads the map.

Why Italy and Germany hold thousands while vast countries show only a few hundred — and what actually counts as a museum — is worth a couple of minutes:

Where museums cluster

The countries with the most mapped museums — a mix of genuine density and how thoroughly each country’s collections are recorded in open data. Open a country for its museum count, theme mix and a sample of named museums.

About this data

Museums and their locations come from Wikidata, the open, CC0 knowledge base. We map every institution catalogued in its museum family that carries a coordinate — 67,911 in all, of which 66,420 fall within a country that has an international (ISO) code and so get a country page; a small number sit in disputed or untagged territory and appear on the map without one. This is best read as a map of where museums are recorded, not a perfectly even census: Western Europe and Japan are catalogued in unusually fine detail, so they appear especially dense, while equally museum-rich regions with thinner open-data coverage look sparser than they truly are. Where the source records a specific kind of museum we sort it into one of six broad themes; the majority carry only the generic label, and we show that honestly rather than guess. We refresh the snapshot periodically rather than calling Wikidata on every visit.