The Vasa makes history - again

The Vasa Museum in Sweden is named the 13th best museum in the world by its visitors. 

  • The Vasa Museum was named one of the world's best museums and Stockholm’s most popular tourist attraction by its visitors. The ship has been seen by over 20 million visitors since 1990. Photo: Peter Isotalo

  • TripAdvisor, a popular, international website that provides travelers’ reviews, has collected user-generated content and announced the world’s top museums of 2014, ranking The Vasa Museum in Sweden as 13th best. It has received two more awards from its visitors: Sweden’s best museum and Stockholm's top attraction.

  • The Vasa Ship today. Do you see the empty gun ports? In 1664, Albreckt von Treileben and Andreas Peckell made a successful attempt to remove some of Vasa's cannons. They removed over 50 using a simple diving bell. But at the time Vasa was still too difficult to recover.

  • The Vasa Museum, situated on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm, showcases the vessel that King Gustav II Adolf contracted to have built in 1625. Her maiden voyage would be her last — she hardly left the harbor before sinking on August 10, 1628. Research showed that the ship was well built but incorrectly proportioned, with insufficient ballast to keep it upright. Divers repeatedly sought permission to salvage anything from the wreckage, and finally in 1961, the Vasa was pulled above water after 333 years. It was in 1990, after excavation and reconstruction, that The Vasa Museum was officially opened by King Carl XVI Gustav.

  • Vasa is going under, 1628. Photo: titanicnorden.org

  • "It's like looking into a time machine,” one reviewer wrote of the museum. “A fantastic insight into life on a ship from a shipping accident 400 years ago."

  • The Vasa Museum has incredible company in the other museums from around the world that made the list, too. Those that are closer to home include Chicago’s Art Institute (#1), the Getty Center in Los Angeles (#4), Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY (#7) and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans (#11).