At the edge of the Royal Mounds, Gamla Uppsala Museum makes an archaeological landscape legible through original finds, a large site model and new research. Its exhibitions connect elite burials and timber monuments with a place that became Sweden’s first archbishopric in 1164.
Guide
At Gamla Uppsala Museum, a model of the landscape helps make sense of what the grass outside conceals. The Royal Mounds are the most visible landmarks, but they belonged to a much larger center of settlement, ceremony and power. This museum is a distinct stop from the mounds themselves: it gathers objects, models and archaeological interpretation, then sends you back outdoors with a sharper eye for the site.
Continue exploring
Discover the full story
Keep reading with a travel pass and explore every full guide and tour.
UpgradeQuick facts
- Gamla Uppsala Museum opened on 18 May 2000; architect Carl Nyrén designed its oval building.
- The permanent exhibition “Myth, Power and People,” opened in 2022, presents the site’s history through original finds, a large landscape model and archaeological interpretation.
- Excavations conducted in 2012–17 ahead of railway expansion found farmsteads, part of a cemetery and a previously unknown timber post monument east of the Royal Mounds.
More places in Uppsala
Biotopia
Biotopia brings Uppland’s wildlife and landscapes into focus through immersive early twentieth-century dioramas, geological displays and hands-on learning. Opened as Biologiska museet in 1910, it pairs preserved habitat scenes with a modern program rooted in Uppsala’s surrounding nature.
Bror Hjorths Hus
Bror Hjorths Hus preserves the red wooden home and studio where modernist artist Bror Hjorth lived and worked from 1943 to 1968. Its rooms hold his art among his books and furniture, tracing a lively exchange between Uppland folk tradition, music, and modernism.
Carolina Rediviva
Carolina Rediviva is Uppsala University Library’s landmark main building, opened in 1841. A name meaning ‘the revived Carolina’ joins a demolished medieval university house to a royal-era library project; its former ceremonial hall, later reading rooms and modern extensions chart changing ideas abou
Cube of Art
A digital art museum inside Juvelen near Uppsala Central Station. In a seven-metre-high black cube, interactive light installations invite visitors to influence changing artworks with movement and touch.
Disagården Open-Air Museum
Along a winding village lane, more than twenty timber buildings brought from across Uppland form a museum landscape imagined as a rural village before the great land reforms. Disagården opened in 1931; its farms, work buildings, gardens and soldier’s croft reveal both nineteenth-century rural life a
Evolutionsmuseet
Uppsala University’s natural history museum spans two neighboring exhibition buildings: Zoology’s animals from around the world and Palaeontology’s fossils and minerals. Its collections grew from early university cabinets into a five-million-object research archive, with roots in Thunberg’s 1785 zoo