Natural History Museum of Rijeka

Around the Museum Square and Nikola Host Park, situated above the Old Town, there are four museums containing memories of the complex history of the city of Rijeka.

The story of Rijeka’s museums starts with the contemporary Croatian State Archive building. At the beginning of the 18th century, Rijeka was still surrounded by city walls and trenches while a medieval city castle oversaw its security from the highest hill of the Old Town. At that time rural Baroque residences were a very modern concept in this harbour town as well as in numerous European monarchies. They were overshadowed by the greenery of the dense parks and situated near the town. So, Bon Mihovil Androcha had a simple summer residence constructed in the middle of the vineyard and olive orchard, on a hill just above the northern city wall. For two centuries, the villa changed hands a great deal. All of the owners were notable Rijeka patrician families, consuls, majors, and entrepreneurs like the Orlands and the Pasquals such as Andrija Ljudevit Adamiæ, John Leard, Giovanni Ciotta and Baron Vranyczany. Finally, when the cousin of the Austrian-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I, Archbishop Joseph Habsburg (Bratislava 1833-Rijeka 1905) came to Rijeka with his family in 1881, he bought the villa for his winter residence. He spent more than twenty years there together with his wife, Archduchess Clotilde and their seven children. The customs of court life and assemblies of the aristocracy necessitated alterations to the villa and so the archduke radically reconstructed the building in 1892, on the basis of a layout proposed by Raffaelo and Pietro Culotti. Three years later, it became a monumental building with numerous balconies, cloisters, lodges and belvederes, richly decorated facades in Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and even Gothic. Internally, lounges, the dining room, workrooms, bathrooms and the family chapel were also richly decorated with architectural plastic.

The archduke was a passionate linguist, a researcher of Bohemian culture and a botanist. So he equipped the Vila Guiseppe with splendid greenery, including trained exotic and autochthonous herbal cultures, fountains, garden plastic, walkways and swimming pools through the Isidor Vauchnig project. The private botanical garden became the biggest and richest of Rijeka’s parks at the end of the 19th century but even today it retains some of its original beauty under the name of Park Nikole Hosta.

After the archduke’s death, the villa became the headquarters of the Gradski muzej (Municipal Museum).Then, after the large-scale refurbishment of 1926 it became the headquarters of the Rijeka National Archive which it still is today, and is open to visitors who, in addition to viewing the interior of the former villa, are also able to visit some of the attractive exhibitions in the Archive’s galleries.
Natural History Museum of Rijeka

In immediate proximity, there is a Natural History Museum, situated in the Park Nikole Hosta complex, the first regional museum in the Rijeka area since its establishment in 1876 when Dr.Joseph Roman Lorenz proposed a concept on the basis of Vienna’s Naturhistoriches Museum. In the beginning, the collection was an integral part of the City Museum, but since 1945, it has operated as an independent institution with a rich opus in today’s location which housed a zoo and an aquarium in the 1960s. Today the museum focuses on marine research but it also has a specialist library with archives from the fields of Biology, Geology, and Palaeontology. Visitors can enjoy the rich collections and permanent exhibitions that depict the geological history of the Adriatic, the methodology of oceanographic research, minerals, sea invertebrates, sharks and ryes, multimedia centres, an aquarium and reptiles and amphibians from the Rijeka area.