Famous museum full of surprises

Kelvingrove Art Gallery displays not only the works of foreign artists, but also showcases Scottish art history. The room with furniture by architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh brings the Glasgow Style (the Scottish version of Art Nouveau) to life. The adjacent room displays works by The Glasgow Boys, a well-known painters’ collective from the 1880s and 1890s.

The nice thing about Kelvingrove is that you only need to cross the Central Hall to enter a totally different universe. Inside the building’s west wing, visitors come face to face with stuffed animals from the museum’s natural history collection. A kangaroo and a cheetah share a space with a life-size giraffe. Visitors can also admire the elephant tusks that David Livingstone brought back from Africa. But the highlight of this section is undoubtedly Sir Roger, the stuffed Asian elephant that lived in the Glasgow Zoo until 1900; he alone is viewed by more than one million visitors a year.

A perfectly restored Spitfire from WW II flies above this motley crew of animals, while the adjacent exhibit room displays Egyptian finds, including a sarcophagus from the 12th dynasty. And that is not all! The museum also houses a medieval weapons collection and a bee exhibit for children, featuring a real beehive. You can easily spend half a day at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery. And an added bonus is that admission is free, as in every national museum in the UK.