Korea National Maritime Museum
Korea’s national maritime museum in Busan, combining navigation history, maritime culture, marine science, an aquarium and family-focused exhibition spaces beside the working harbor
Navigation instruments, historic maps and atlases, Korean naval and maritime records, marine science, aquarium displays, media installations, children’s exhibitions and research resources
A large four-storey national museum on the Yeongdo waterfront, with major permanent galleries on the upper floors plus an aquarium, media gallery, maritime library and children’s museum
The museum is at its best when the sea becomes a technical problem: stars, clocks, atlases and globes show how sailors turned open water into something measurable enough to cross
Character
A mariner using the museum’s 1588 nocturnal would sight Polaris through a hole at its center, rotate a pointer toward a reference star and read local time from the dial. Time mattered at sea partly because it helped calculate tides. The instrument turns navigation into a small mechanical act performed against the night sky
The collection also includes a Dutch sea atlas published by Pieter Goos in 1666, Robert Dudley’s 1646 *Dell’Arcano del Mare*, and a pair of terrestrial and celestial globes made by Newton & Son in 1846. Korean material sits alongside them, including the 1795 *Yi Chungmugong Jeonseo* and records of coastal administration, naval defense and seaborne movement
The experience
The third-floor Maritime Hall approaches the sea through records, art and everyday life. The fourth-floor Navigation Hall shifts toward finding routes, the age of long-distance navigation and the history of protecting sea lanes and territory
A third-floor aquarium covers marine life and coral ecosystems, while a large media gallery deals with marine biology, industry, history and art. The maritime library and children’s museum add research and family spaces, so the museum can occupy anything from a focused historical visit to a much longer day indoors
The museum stands on Yeongdo beside Busan’s maritime cluster, with working port infrastructure and open water immediately outside rather than an inland museum district
History
The National Maritime Museum opened on 9 July 2012 as Korea’s first comprehensive national maritime museum. The building was constructed on a roughly 45,000-square-metre site with one basement level and four floors above ground. At opening it contained eight permanent exhibition halls, a special-exhibition gallery, maritime library, children’s museum, aquarium and 4D theater
By the end of 2021, the museum held 26,416 maritime artifacts and archival materials from Korea and abroad, according to the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries. The holdings range from maps and navigational instruments to naval records, ship models, everyday maritime objects and modern industrial material
A broader renewal began around the museum’s tenth anniversary in 2022, with exhibition facilities gradually updated. The children’s museum reopened after a year-long redesign in 2025, replacing its earlier displays with a new permanent exhibition built around the past, present and future of the sea
Before you go
Floors 3 and 4 form the historical core, while the aquarium, media gallery and children’s museum broaden the same building in different directions
- Hours
- Open Tue–Fri 09:00–18:00 and Sat, Sun and public holidays 09:00–19:00. Last admission is 30 minutes before closing. Closed Mondays; when Monday is a national holiday, closure moves to the first following weekday
- Admission
- General museum admission is free; some special exhibitions may charge separately
- Access
- Foreign-language guided tours require reservation by phone or email at least five days in advance and begin at the second-floor information desk
- Transit
- From Nampo Station on Busan Metro Line 1, Exit 6, Bus 66 serves the National Maritime Museum on Yeongdo