About the museum

Travel 500 years back in time at the LVR open-air museum in Kommern in the Eifel region. One of the largest museums of its kind in the whole of Europe takes you right into the world of our ancestors. In 77 historic buildings, including farms, workshops, windmills and watermills, you can experience at first hand how people once lived and worked in the Rhineland, as if time had stood still. The smell of freshly baked bread fills the air. Geese and chickens run excitedly over the cobblestones. Mousetrap monger Regine ‘Jien’ Braconnier loudly advertises her wares. From the forge comes the loud clanging of the hammer on the anvil.

Throughout the year, visitors can gain an insight into village life in the former Prussian Rhine Province. Various projects and events offer the opportunity to get involved yourself. A total of 77 historic houses and stables were dismantled in the Rhineland and rebuilt on the 110-hectare museum site. Simple smoke houses without flues, as were typical in the Westerwald in the 16th century. Half-timbered buildings from the northern Eifel. But there are also farms and stables where people in the Lower Rhine and Bergisch regions lived with pigs, horses and chickens under one roof, and visitors can also meet ‘real’ people from the past, such as farmer's wife Anna Ippendorf, as they stroll through the villages and hamlets, fields and orchards. She has lively stories to tell about cooking on an open fire, spinning on a spinning wheel and the arduous gardening work.

It is only a few steps from everyday village life to the more recent past. In the narrow streets of the small town of Rhenania, visitors walk through time from the French occupation to the German Empire and the post-war period. From here, they reach the Rhineland marketplace, which brings the 1950s to 1990s back to life.