Schifffahrtsmuseum und Rum-Museum

The Schifffahrtsmuseum (Museum of Shipping) and Rum Museum occupy a building in the harbour district and cover the two pillars of Flensburg's commercial history: the Baltic Sea trade and the Caribbean rum business. The shipping collection includes model ships, navigational instruments, and documentation of the city's role as a regional trading port over six centuries.

The rum section is the more distinctive of the two, documenting the extraordinary story of how a mid-sized German city became the centre of the German rum trade through an accident of Danish colonial history. The collection includes antique bottling equipment, trading records, and a range of historical Flensburg rum labels. Combined, the two collections make this the most informative museum in the city.

things to do museum
A story
Flensburg was the largest rum-importing city in Germany for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with trading houses that bought Caribbean rum in bulk, blended it, and sold it across northern Europe. The trade grew from Danish commercial privileges in the Caribbean — Denmark's Virgin Islands colonies supplied much of the raw material — and Flensburg merchants built their warehouses along the harbour specifically for rum storage. By 1900, there were over forty rum trading houses in the city.

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