Croatia’s most visited museums revealed as visitor numbers surge, but youth attendance drops

Tehnical Museum (Photo: Marko Vrdoljak/Zagreb Tourist Board)

ZAGREB, 2 April (Hina) – Croatian museums welcomed 5,144,262 visitors in 2025, up 8.1% on 2024 but slightly below the pre-pandemic record of 5.4 million in 2018, the Museum Documentation Centre (MDC) reported.

A survey of 172 registered public and private museums, with a 93% response rate, showed the five most visited museums accounted for 2.2 million visits, over half by international tourists. The top five were: Archaeological Museum of Istria (710,196), Dubrovnik Museums (550,914), Nikola Tesla Technical Museum (398,575), Split City Museum (325,613) and Museums of Hrvatsko Zagorje (233,411).

Visits to travelling exhibitions rose 130% year on year. In Zagreb, almost half of the 33 registered museums remain closed for renovation, so projects were hosted in other museum venues. MDC notes that visitors to travelling exhibitions are counted at the host museums, not the lending ones.

The National Museum of Modern Art’s NMMU on Tour programme visited Dubrovnik, Križevci, Karlovac, Nova Gradiška, Našice, Opatija, the Zagreb Technical Museum and Bucharest.

The Museum of Arts and Crafts’ touring projects drew 132,000 visitors, including over 50,000 for the Pula exhibition; its new small gallery reported only 4,220 visitors.

The Croatian History Museum, also closed, reached hundreds of thousands of potential visitors with its Stars of Croatian History exhibition in Zagreb Airport’s Museum Zone.

Croatian History Museum (Photo: Marko Vrdoljak/Zagreb Tourist Board)

Decline in young visitors remains a concern

MDC director Maja Kocijan highlighted a continuing drop in school-age visitors: visits by secondary- and primary-school pupils are down 44% and 20% respectively compared with 2018.

She noted a positive decline in events without tickets, previously a “grey zone” in statistics, which are now excluded to meet international museum standards.

In 2018 over one million visitors were reported for such events; in 2025 that figure was 40% lower. Similar reforms in Denmark reduced museum visitor numbers from 17 million in 2024 to nine million.

Natural History Museum in Zagreb (Photo: Grad Zagreb)

Kocijan stressed that, while museums are expected to serve as forums for learning, dialogue, social reflection and inclusion, visitor counts are only one limited but necessary metric of their programmes and impact, to be complemented by qualitative evaluation and user research.