A modest old-fashioned natural history museum founded by the Society of Natural History of Colmar in 1859, with Bartholdi himself among its early donors. Two floors of mineralogy, palaeontology, regional zoology and a slightly random ethnographic collection — Egyptian artefacts, Pacific Island carvings, North African textiles — collected by 19th-century Colmar travellers and missionaries.
The Egyptian section is the most surprising find: a mummified crocodile and a child's sarcophagus picked up in the 1860s by a local doctor. It is not a polished museum experience, but it has the lived-in charm of a 19th-century cabinet of curiosities — and at only a few euros to enter, makes a useful rainy-day stop.