The Polar Museum

Located in Tromsø, Norway, The Polar Museum showcases Arctic exploration and cultural history. Exhibits include stories of explorers like Willem Barentsz and Roald Amundsen, as well as displays on sealing, overwintering, and Svalbard’s cultural heritage. The museum is housed in historic buildings that were once Tromsø’s Customs premises. A museum shop offers unique gifts for visitors.

Planning your visit

The Polar Museum occupies Tromsø's old Customs House on the harbour, and it tells the Arctic story from the working end rather than the heroic one. Alongside the famous expeditions — Willem Barentsz, Roald Amundsen, whose final flight left from Tromsø in 1928 searching for a lost airship and never returned — the museum covers sealing, trapping and overwintering: the men and occasionally women who spent winters alone in huts on Svalbard hunting fox and polar bear, and what that life actually involved. The displays are old-fashioned in style, with taxidermy, traps and reconstructed hut interiors, and that dated quality suits the subject.

Tromsø sits well inside the Arctic Circle, and the museum gives useful context for a place most visitors reach for the northern lights or the midnight sun without much sense of its history as a base for polar expeditions. Allow about an hour. It is compact and centrally located on the waterfront.

Bookable options mostly combine the museum with walking tours of Tromsø's historic centre, which is small and quickly covered — wooden houses, the cathedral, the harbour. Guided formats are available in several languages including Italian and French, which is unusual this far north and useful if English is not your first language. Private and shared city walks with museum entry are the standard formats, and private guided tours allow a slower pace inside. Current options are shown below.