Museum or collection — what you do

Bunk'Art, underground

A five-storey bunker built for a leadership expecting invasion that never came; the exhibition does not soften the regime.

Tirana, Albania · low

The manuscript library

Illuminated books rescued repeatedly over centuries, some buried during massacres and dug up afterwards.

Yerevan, Armenia · low

Into the salt mountain

Miners' slides, a salt lake underground, and the Bronze Age tools that came out of the same shafts.

Hallstatt, Austria · moderate

The Tunnel of Hope

800 metres dug by hand under the runway; it kept the city alive for three years and is explained by people who used it.

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina · low

Walk the rainbow

150 metres of coloured glass on the roof; the city changes hue as you walk, which is the entire idea.

Aarhus, Denmark · moderate

Siida, on Sámi terms

A national minority telling its own story, including the parts about the Finnish state — worth an afternoon rather than an hour.

Inari, Finland · low

The painted caves, original and copy

Font-de-Gaume still admits a few dozen people a day to originals; Lascaux is a facsimile because breath destroyed the real one within fifteen years of opening.

Sarlat & the Dordogne, France · moderate

The Acropolis Museum, third floor

The Parthenon frieze laid out at actual scale and orientation, with plaster casts where the British Museum holds the originals — the gaps are the argument.

Athens, Greece · moderate

Inside a nuraghe

Su Nuraxi at Barumini is the UNESCO one, but there are seven thousand of these dry-stone towers and you can walk into many of them alone.

Alghero, Sardinia, Italy · low

Six thousand years of rock carving

Thousands of figures — boats, reindeer, bears, people — pecked into coastal rock over five millennia, and read in order along a boardwalk.

Alta, Norway · low

Maihaugen open-air museum

Two hundred buildings moved log by log from across Gudbrandsdalen; the point is the carpentry, not the costumes.

Lillehammer, Norway · moderate

Vemork and the heavy water raid

The plant, the pipeline the saboteurs climbed, and an account that does not tidy up how close it came to failing.

Rjukan, Norway · moderate

Down the Olav mine

Five degrees underground year-round, hard hats, and the noise a hand drill made before compressed air.

Røros, Norway · moderate

The salt cathedral at Wieliczka

A chapel 101 metres underground with chandeliers of salt crystal, carved by miners over decades in their own time.

Kraków, Poland · moderate

POLIN, a thousand years

The museum deliberately spends most of its space on Jewish life rather than its destruction, which is what makes it unlike any other.

Warsaw, Poland · moderate

One free national collection a day

Britain's museums charge nothing for the permanent collections; treat one as an hour's visit rather than a day's endurance.

London, United Kingdom · low