Credit: Denis Bučar

In 2025, Croatian museums had 5,144,262 visitors, 8.1% rise when compared to 2024, but still below the 5.4 million recorded in the pre-pandemic 2018.

The Museum Documentation Center conducted the survey at the beginning of the year, collecting visitor numbers of 161 out of 172 museums from the Register of Public and Private Museums in the Republic of Croatia, a 93% response rate.

The Archaeological Museum of Istria is once more the most visited in Croatia, recording 710,196 visitors in 2025. The Dubrovnik Museums came in second with 550,914 visitors, followed by the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum with 398,575, the Split City Museum with 325,613, and the Museums of Hrvatsko Zagorje with 233,411 visitors. The five most visited museums achieved 2.2 million visits, over half of which were made by foreign tourists.

One thing to keep in mind when interpreting the top list of the most-visited museums in Croatia is that, out of the 33 registered museums in Zagreb, almost half are currently closed. So, all the visitors that the closed Zagreb museums had attracted with their exhibitions installed at other museums are counted not to the museums that created the exhibitions but to the museums hosting the exhibitions, where the visitor physically entered.

What remains a concern is the continued decline in the number of children and young people, especially primary and secondary school students. Compared to the record 2018, the number of secondary school students fell by 44%, while the number of primary school children dropped by 20%.

Visitor survey 2025 (pdf)

(Maja Kocijan, complete analysis published in the News from the Museum World 268, March 31, 2026)