Wrakkenmuseum

The Wrakkenmuseum (Shipwreck Museum) in Formerum is one of the more eccentric small museums in the Netherlands. The building started as a working farm and has been slowly buried under the founder's lifelong collection of objects retrieved from shipwrecks off Terschelling — pottery, navigation instruments, cannonballs, lead seal weights, fragments of carved oak from the East Indiamen that went down in the Wadden Sea.

There is also a café and a small terrace on site. The lack of formal museography is part of the appeal: it feels like wandering through a working salvor's barn. Open daily in summer, weekends only in shoulder season.

things to do museum
A story
The museum was started in the 1950s by a local diver who began salvaging cargo from the 17th-century Dutch East India Company wrecks that litter the seabed north of Terschelling — every object on display has been pulled from the Wadden Sea by hand, and most are still encrusted with mud and barnacles.