Plenty of museums here let kids touch. On this list they get to do something: scoop paper from a vat, set a clanking machine moving, stand in a Roman sewer. A few sit over the French border or a train ride away, so plan a day for those. Here's what we checked, from the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum to the steam trains at Cité du Train.
The permanent galleries fill an old town building with dinosaurs, a mammoth and saber-toothed tiger, whales and fish, ammonites and other fossils, and invertebrates from squid to butterflies.
One gallery follows a butterfly from egg to adult, another covers threatened and extinct animals like the quagga and dodo, and Showcase Nature brings together the birds, mammals and minerals of Switzerland.
Four floors and more than 1,000 square meters of historical toys: over 2,500 teddy bears (the most comprehensive collection in the world, many by Steiff), dolls, old dolls' houses, grocery shops and 1:12 miniatures. Many scenes start moving at the push of a button.
On an animated tablet tour, virtual figures move through the displays, and a kids' track sends zeppelins flying and music notes dancing out of a gramophone.
The Swiss Museum of Paper, Writing and Printing sits in a late medieval mill beside a rushing mill stream, where the mill wheel turns and the stamping mill hammers away. Kids scoop their own sheet of paper, write with a goose quill, try a typewriter, typeset their name and make marbled paper. Craftspeople work the historic machines on site, so families watch printing and bookbinding done the old way.
Museum Tinguely holds the world's largest collection of work by Swiss artist Jean Tinguely: moving machine sculptures built around wheels and motors, most of them still in working order. The permanent exhibition has many hands-on spots where visitors set things in motion.
On the second floor, a glass wall looks into the open workshop where restorers keep the machines running. Solitude Park and the Rhine bank sit right outside.
MUKS is a small museum in a historic building in Riehen, the village on the Swiss-German border. Its permanent Spiel (play) exhibition fills rooms themed on dreaming, living and cheating with old toys, odd inventions and a dream bubble to slip into.
A second permanent show, Village, tells Riehen's history. Outside, a courtyard and garden have seating, sun umbrellas, games and a self-service kiosk.
Switzerland's most-visited museum covers rail, road, air, water and space travel. Kids can see original locomotives, two Swissair planes, rockets and Mars rovers, a submarine, and a 31.5-meter model of the Gotthard railway. A walk-in cube makes the floor turn into a wall.
Outside, younger kids ride scooters, climb into play buses and take the miniature garden railway. A planetarium, a film theater and a chocolate ride share the site.
Cité du Train holds the biggest collection of railway equipment in continental Europe: more than a hundred locomotives, coaches and wagons covering over 150 years of French rail history. The Show Circuit sets 27 of them in sound-and-light scenes.
Kids can watch steam locomotive 232 U 1 turn its driving wheels every 30 minutes, ride a small electric train between the big ones, and set a model railway diorama running.
Augusta Raurica is the excavated Roman town at Augst, with more than twenty monuments to view, walk on or touch. Kids can sit in the best-preserved Roman theater north of the Alps, stand inside a Roman sewer channel and explore a furnished Roman house modeled on a Pompeii villa.
The museum puts some finds at kid eye level, and the animal park keeps breeds similar to Roman farm animals.
The Écomusée d'Alsace is the largest open-air museum in France: around 80 half-timbered houses, workshops and farm buildings, moved here and rebuilt as a village, showing rural Alsace from the Middle Ages to the early 1900s.
Kids watch traditional crafts being demonstrated, meet some 60 farm animals of old local breeds, and walk the fields and forest around the village. It sits between Mulhouse and Colmar.
Switzerland's largest anthropological museum holds over 340,000 objects from around the world, shown in changing exhibitions on the Münsterplatz. In the permanent Alive galleries, kids can join in braiding a giant textile tree among carved ancestors and altars.
A separate annex covers Basel Carnival, with ceiling-high lanterns, masks, costumes, piccolos and drums, plus a replica carnival pub.
The only museum in Switzerland showing a complete Plateosaurus skeleton, dug from a clay pit near Frick. Next to it is a predatory dinosaur found here in 2006 with its last meal still in its stomach, plus ammonites, ichthyosaur fossils and a film about how the dinosaurs were found.
Behind Frick station, the open-air Klopfplatz lets kids hammer fossil-rich limestone for shells and ammonites.
Plenty of museums here let kids touch. On this list they get to do something: scoop paper from a vat, set a clanking machine moving, stand in a Roman sewer. A few sit over the French border or a train ride away, so plan a day for those. Here's what we checked, from the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum to the steam trains at Cité du Train.
The permanent galleries fill an old town building with dinosaurs, a mammoth and saber-toothed tiger, whales and fish, ammonites and other fossils, and invertebrates from squid to butterflies.
One gallery follows a butterfly from egg to adult, another covers threatened and extinct animals like the quagga and dodo, and Showcase Nature brings together the birds, mammals and minerals of Switzerland.
Four floors and more than 1,000 square meters of historical toys: over 2,500 teddy bears (the most comprehensive collection in the world, many by Steiff), dolls, old dolls' houses, grocery shops and 1:12 miniatures. Many scenes start moving at the push of a button.
On an animated tablet tour, virtual figures move through the displays, and a kids' track sends zeppelins flying and music notes dancing out of a gramophone.
The Swiss Museum of Paper, Writing and Printing sits in a late medieval mill beside a rushing mill stream, where the mill wheel turns and the stamping mill hammers away. Kids scoop their own sheet of paper, write with a goose quill, try a typewriter, typeset their name and make marbled paper. Craftspeople work the historic machines on site, so families watch printing and bookbinding done the old way.
Museum Tinguely holds the world's largest collection of work by Swiss artist Jean Tinguely: moving machine sculptures built around wheels and motors, most of them still in working order. The permanent exhibition has many hands-on spots where visitors set things in motion.
On the second floor, a glass wall looks into the open workshop where restorers keep the machines running. Solitude Park and the Rhine bank sit right outside.
MUKS is a small museum in a historic building in Riehen, the village on the Swiss-German border. Its permanent Spiel (play) exhibition fills rooms themed on dreaming, living and cheating with old toys, odd inventions and a dream bubble to slip into.
A second permanent show, Village, tells Riehen's history. Outside, a courtyard and garden have seating, sun umbrellas, games and a self-service kiosk.
Switzerland's most-visited museum covers rail, road, air, water and space travel. Kids can see original locomotives, two Swissair planes, rockets and Mars rovers, a submarine, and a 31.5-meter model of the Gotthard railway. A walk-in cube makes the floor turn into a wall.
Outside, younger kids ride scooters, climb into play buses and take the miniature garden railway. A planetarium, a film theater and a chocolate ride share the site.
Cité du Train holds the biggest collection of railway equipment in continental Europe: more than a hundred locomotives, coaches and wagons covering over 150 years of French rail history. The Show Circuit sets 27 of them in sound-and-light scenes.
Kids can watch steam locomotive 232 U 1 turn its driving wheels every 30 minutes, ride a small electric train between the big ones, and set a model railway diorama running.
Augusta Raurica is the excavated Roman town at Augst, with more than twenty monuments to view, walk on or touch. Kids can sit in the best-preserved Roman theater north of the Alps, stand inside a Roman sewer channel and explore a furnished Roman house modeled on a Pompeii villa.
The museum puts some finds at kid eye level, and the animal park keeps breeds similar to Roman farm animals.
The Écomusée d'Alsace is the largest open-air museum in France: around 80 half-timbered houses, workshops and farm buildings, moved here and rebuilt as a village, showing rural Alsace from the Middle Ages to the early 1900s.
Kids watch traditional crafts being demonstrated, meet some 60 farm animals of old local breeds, and walk the fields and forest around the village. It sits between Mulhouse and Colmar.
Switzerland's largest anthropological museum holds over 340,000 objects from around the world, shown in changing exhibitions on the Münsterplatz. In the permanent Alive galleries, kids can join in braiding a giant textile tree among carved ancestors and altars.
A separate annex covers Basel Carnival, with ceiling-high lanterns, masks, costumes, piccolos and drums, plus a replica carnival pub.
The only museum in Switzerland showing a complete Plateosaurus skeleton, dug from a clay pit near Frick. Next to it is a predatory dinosaur found here in 2006 with its last meal still in its stomach, plus ammonites, ichthyosaur fossils and a film about how the dinosaurs were found.
Behind Frick station, the open-air Klopfplatz lets kids hammer fossil-rich limestone for shells and ammonites.
