Vilnius winters run long, and fall brings plenty of gray, wet afternoons. These are the indoor spots we head to when the park is off the table: hands-on museums, trampoline parks for burning off energy, a wave pool, a rink that stays frozen all year and a puppet theater. Here's what we checked, from Tesla coils at the Energy and Technology Museum to the climbing walls at Montis Magia Pikas.
The museum fills the city's first public power plant. Downstairs are its original steam boilers, turbines and control panel. The 1,000 m² Transformation Hall puts the two largest Tesla coils in the Baltics inside a Faraday cage, and challenges at each exhibit earn points to swap for souvenirs.
The two top floors hold an interactive science zone with a Jacob's ladder, a Möbius strip and a Bernoulli ball.
The first museum in Lithuania devoted to LEGO, built from a private collection of more than 2,000 modern sets. Themed zones cover LEGO City, a medieval village, pirates and Vikings, the Wild West, Minecraft, dinosaurs and space, plus a giant minifigure wall.
Exhibits are look-only, but the construction wall lets kids build and add to a shared piece. Trains and lights run on a short program every hour.
The Museum of Illusions fills 600 m² of a historic building on Vokiečių Street with hands-on exhibits that mix optics, physics and art: optical illusions, installations, gravity and light experiments, and historical illusions.
Exhibits are interactive, photos are allowed everywhere, and guides on the floor explain how each trick works. Curious school-age kids who like asking why get the most out of it.
Žaislų muziejus tells the story of Lithuanian toys, and kids are invited to pick up and try many of the exhibits. Four permanent exhibitions run from medieval toys rebuilt from archaeological finds, through a hands-on Stone Age room of stone, wood and sand, to toys from a century ago and 20th-century toys and arcade machines.
Most of the 5,000-plus items in the collection were donated by visitors.
The Bank of Lithuania's Money Museum tells the story of money across five halls, about 300 square meters in all. It starts with the oldest forms of exchange, such as grain, fur and amber (long traded in this region), and ends with digital currency.
The exhibits are interactive, and audio guides come in several languages, so kids who don't read Lithuanian can still follow along.
The residence of Lithuania's grand dukes, gone from the mid-1600s and rebuilt this century, is now a national museum. Four routes run through it: surviving castle walls and archaeological finds, furnished Renaissance and Baroque state rooms, weapons and palace kitchen displays, and temporary exhibitions.
The state rooms route climbs an observation tower with views over the city. Outside are a Renaissance garden and bas-reliefs.
The national railway museum fills part of the second floor of Vilnius station, with almost 900 exhibits on how Lithuania's trains run: passenger travel, track maintenance and signaling.
Outside, the Rail Park (Bėgių parkas) spreads 12 exhibits over 7,100 square meters: locomotives, wagons, a water steam pump and a wagon heating boiler. It suits train-mad kids who want to see the real thing up close.
The Old Arsenal holds the National Museum of Lithuania's archaeology collection, a 12,000-year walk from the first people after the ice melted to the Baltic tribes of the Iron Age.
The ground floor has Stone Age tools and weapons and replicas of seven key finds. Upstairs covers the 1st to 13th centuries: farming, metalwork, weapons and ceramics.
Vilnius Auto Museum fills a former taxi depot with over 100 historic cars and motorcycles from 10 countries. Exhibits run from the first cars of the late 1800s through interwar Lithuania and World War II vehicles to race cars and cars that carried Lithuanian presidents.
Younger kids can try a Ford Model T and hunt for secret doors in cars, and a children's area has toy cars, coloring and books.
This puppet theater has staged shows since 1958 and plays in the Oginskiai Palace on Arklių Street. The children's repertoire mixes puppet, shadow and object theater, from Pinocchio, Cinderella and The Snow Queen to new Lithuanian plays.
In the cellar, the Living Puppet Museum shows puppets, masks and set pieces made in the theater's own workshops in the same building, with tours led by professional puppeteers.
Lithuania's national library fills a 1963 building on Gediminas Avenue, the first in the Baltics designed and built as a library, which reopened after a reconstruction that ended in 2016.
Beyond the reading rooms and the skylit atrium lined with books, it has a children's activity center called Žaisloteka (Toytheque), a makerspace called PATS SAU, a media makerspace, a cinema room and a music room.
360 Arena is a 7,900 m² indoor hall of trampolines and interactive sports games. Older kids get acrobatic trampolines, an airbag, a ninja course, a volcano, an air track for gymnastics and light-up challenge games such as ValoJump and iWall.
Younger kids have separate junior and toddler zones, including four smaller trampolines inside the play structure. Eleven themed party rooms and the 360 Food restaurant are on site.
A 2,500 m² indoor play park in the Ogmios miestas shopping village, with two trampoline zones for bigger kids and separate trampolines for under-10s. There is a three-level climbing frame with slides and tunnels, a spinning vortex tunnel, a 140 m² knitted play net, a trampoline game played against a screen, interactive bikes and a foosball table for 22. A pizzeria is on site.
Adventica is a family play park on the 1B floor of the Ozas shopping center. It holds the largest single inflatable trampoline in the Baltics, plus a 100-meter Ninja Warrior obstacle course, a ropes course and a three-story play frame with trampolines.
There is also an 80-meter electric go-kart track, a games zone with interactive walls and building sets, and a separate area for under-3s beside the parents' seating.
MaryMaris is an indoor play park in the Akropolis mall, built around a multi-level air maze with tube slides, nets and obstacles. Around it sit a trampoline complex, a ball pit, a Volcano to climb and slide down, a free fall tower, a ninja obstacle course and sports machines.
A family restaurant and party cabins for birthdays are on site.
An ice rink on the ground floor of the Akropolis mall, open all year for public skating in timed sessions. Cafes ring the rink, so parents can sit and watch, and the ice also hosts figure skating shows and hockey games.
New skaters can skate with a penguin aid to hold on to, and protective pads are lent free. Kids can join figure skating and hockey training.
A Polynesian-themed aqua park spread over several floors. There are nine slides, from family boat rides on the Ohana river to the 60 km/h Moreja volcano, plus the Dolphins' sea wave pool with waves up to 1.5 m and the 137 m Canoe river for floating on rings.
Smaller children get the Game island, eight platforms of tunnels and slides where they control the water jets, watched by lifeguards.
Zoopark is the city's only indoor zoo, home to nearly 90 species from around the world, inside the Ogmios miestas complex. Kids can watch ring-tailed lemurs, meerkats, marmosets, tamarins, flying squirrels, tortoises, geckos and pythons up close.
Visitors can feed the rabbits, guinea pigs, koi and parrots, and keepers feed the meerkats, lemurs and monkeys several times a day.
Vilnius TV Tower is the tallest structure in Lithuania, at 326.4 meters. The observation deck sits 170 meters up on the 67th floor, with a bistro looking out over the city and an open terrace in the warm season.
At its foot, granite markers and the bronze "Sacrifice" sculpture remember the 14 people killed defending the tower on January 13, 1991, and a small park shows historic broadcast antennas.
Montis Magia Pikas is a full-service climbing gym run by the Montis Magia climbing club, with about 1,187 square meters of wall. Tall rope walls take up most of the hall, and a separate bouldering area has lower walls climbed without a rope.
Training boards cover stronger climbers. The club also runs a climbing school whose instructors teach rope technique and mountain skills.
Vilnius winters run long, and fall brings plenty of gray, wet afternoons. These are the indoor spots we head to when the park is off the table: hands-on museums, trampoline parks for burning off energy, a wave pool, a rink that stays frozen all year and a puppet theater. Here's what we checked, from Tesla coils at the Energy and Technology Museum to the climbing walls at Montis Magia Pikas.
The museum fills the city's first public power plant. Downstairs are its original steam boilers, turbines and control panel. The 1,000 m² Transformation Hall puts the two largest Tesla coils in the Baltics inside a Faraday cage, and challenges at each exhibit earn points to swap for souvenirs.
The two top floors hold an interactive science zone with a Jacob's ladder, a Möbius strip and a Bernoulli ball.
The first museum in Lithuania devoted to LEGO, built from a private collection of more than 2,000 modern sets. Themed zones cover LEGO City, a medieval village, pirates and Vikings, the Wild West, Minecraft, dinosaurs and space, plus a giant minifigure wall.
Exhibits are look-only, but the construction wall lets kids build and add to a shared piece. Trains and lights run on a short program every hour.
The Museum of Illusions fills 600 m² of a historic building on Vokiečių Street with hands-on exhibits that mix optics, physics and art: optical illusions, installations, gravity and light experiments, and historical illusions.
Exhibits are interactive, photos are allowed everywhere, and guides on the floor explain how each trick works. Curious school-age kids who like asking why get the most out of it.
Žaislų muziejus tells the story of Lithuanian toys, and kids are invited to pick up and try many of the exhibits. Four permanent exhibitions run from medieval toys rebuilt from archaeological finds, through a hands-on Stone Age room of stone, wood and sand, to toys from a century ago and 20th-century toys and arcade machines.
Most of the 5,000-plus items in the collection were donated by visitors.
The Bank of Lithuania's Money Museum tells the story of money across five halls, about 300 square meters in all. It starts with the oldest forms of exchange, such as grain, fur and amber (long traded in this region), and ends with digital currency.
The exhibits are interactive, and audio guides come in several languages, so kids who don't read Lithuanian can still follow along.
The residence of Lithuania's grand dukes, gone from the mid-1600s and rebuilt this century, is now a national museum. Four routes run through it: surviving castle walls and archaeological finds, furnished Renaissance and Baroque state rooms, weapons and palace kitchen displays, and temporary exhibitions.
The state rooms route climbs an observation tower with views over the city. Outside are a Renaissance garden and bas-reliefs.
The national railway museum fills part of the second floor of Vilnius station, with almost 900 exhibits on how Lithuania's trains run: passenger travel, track maintenance and signaling.
Outside, the Rail Park (Bėgių parkas) spreads 12 exhibits over 7,100 square meters: locomotives, wagons, a water steam pump and a wagon heating boiler. It suits train-mad kids who want to see the real thing up close.
The Old Arsenal holds the National Museum of Lithuania's archaeology collection, a 12,000-year walk from the first people after the ice melted to the Baltic tribes of the Iron Age.
The ground floor has Stone Age tools and weapons and replicas of seven key finds. Upstairs covers the 1st to 13th centuries: farming, metalwork, weapons and ceramics.
Vilnius Auto Museum fills a former taxi depot with over 100 historic cars and motorcycles from 10 countries. Exhibits run from the first cars of the late 1800s through interwar Lithuania and World War II vehicles to race cars and cars that carried Lithuanian presidents.
Younger kids can try a Ford Model T and hunt for secret doors in cars, and a children's area has toy cars, coloring and books.
This puppet theater has staged shows since 1958 and plays in the Oginskiai Palace on Arklių Street. The children's repertoire mixes puppet, shadow and object theater, from Pinocchio, Cinderella and The Snow Queen to new Lithuanian plays.
In the cellar, the Living Puppet Museum shows puppets, masks and set pieces made in the theater's own workshops in the same building, with tours led by professional puppeteers.
Lithuania's national library fills a 1963 building on Gediminas Avenue, the first in the Baltics designed and built as a library, which reopened after a reconstruction that ended in 2016.
Beyond the reading rooms and the skylit atrium lined with books, it has a children's activity center called Žaisloteka (Toytheque), a makerspace called PATS SAU, a media makerspace, a cinema room and a music room.
360 Arena is a 7,900 m² indoor hall of trampolines and interactive sports games. Older kids get acrobatic trampolines, an airbag, a ninja course, a volcano, an air track for gymnastics and light-up challenge games such as ValoJump and iWall.
Younger kids have separate junior and toddler zones, including four smaller trampolines inside the play structure. Eleven themed party rooms and the 360 Food restaurant are on site.
A 2,500 m² indoor play park in the Ogmios miestas shopping village, with two trampoline zones for bigger kids and separate trampolines for under-10s. There is a three-level climbing frame with slides and tunnels, a spinning vortex tunnel, a 140 m² knitted play net, a trampoline game played against a screen, interactive bikes and a foosball table for 22. A pizzeria is on site.
Adventica is a family play park on the 1B floor of the Ozas shopping center. It holds the largest single inflatable trampoline in the Baltics, plus a 100-meter Ninja Warrior obstacle course, a ropes course and a three-story play frame with trampolines.
There is also an 80-meter electric go-kart track, a games zone with interactive walls and building sets, and a separate area for under-3s beside the parents' seating.
MaryMaris is an indoor play park in the Akropolis mall, built around a multi-level air maze with tube slides, nets and obstacles. Around it sit a trampoline complex, a ball pit, a Volcano to climb and slide down, a free fall tower, a ninja obstacle course and sports machines.
A family restaurant and party cabins for birthdays are on site.
An ice rink on the ground floor of the Akropolis mall, open all year for public skating in timed sessions. Cafes ring the rink, so parents can sit and watch, and the ice also hosts figure skating shows and hockey games.
New skaters can skate with a penguin aid to hold on to, and protective pads are lent free. Kids can join figure skating and hockey training.
A Polynesian-themed aqua park spread over several floors. There are nine slides, from family boat rides on the Ohana river to the 60 km/h Moreja volcano, plus the Dolphins' sea wave pool with waves up to 1.5 m and the 137 m Canoe river for floating on rings.
Smaller children get the Game island, eight platforms of tunnels and slides where they control the water jets, watched by lifeguards.
Zoopark is the city's only indoor zoo, home to nearly 90 species from around the world, inside the Ogmios miestas complex. Kids can watch ring-tailed lemurs, meerkats, marmosets, tamarins, flying squirrels, tortoises, geckos and pythons up close.
Visitors can feed the rabbits, guinea pigs, koi and parrots, and keepers feed the meerkats, lemurs and monkeys several times a day.
Vilnius TV Tower is the tallest structure in Lithuania, at 326.4 meters. The observation deck sits 170 meters up on the 67th floor, with a bistro looking out over the city and an open terrace in the warm season.
At its foot, granite markers and the bronze "Sacrifice" sculpture remember the 14 people killed defending the tower on January 13, 1991, and a small park shows historic broadcast antennas.
Montis Magia Pikas is a full-service climbing gym run by the Montis Magia climbing club, with about 1,187 square meters of wall. Tall rope walls take up most of the hall, and a separate bouldering area has lower walls climbed without a rope.
Training boards cover stronger climbers. The club also runs a climbing school whose instructors teach rope technique and mountain skills.
