Usually, even the smallest rural town can be proud of its ancestors’ heritage, affectionately and respectfully collected within the walls of the local museum. However, few, even among huge capitals, can boast of museums, whose history of unique collections started long ago, in the 19th-20th centuries. The Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, founded in 1879, is such an old museum. Famous American writer and artist Ernest Thompson Seton wrote about the legendary Canadian museum at the end of the 19th century, and those rare exhibits can still be seen today.

The modern facility of the museum was built in 1965 by the famous Canadian architect Herbert Henry Gatenby Moody. It even includes a planetarium. A huge six-floor building with nine spacious galleries is located in the heart of the city near the scenic banks of the Red River. The Queen of Great Britain Elizabeth II attended its grand opening. All valuable artifacts were collected piece by piece and formed an extensive collection of human and natural heritage.

The Manitoba province museum is the first one in Canada with a virtual underwater observatory showing the visitors what life on the planet was like 450 million years ago. Here, you can see a giant trilobite and a precise full-scale replica of the legendary ship Nonsuch, whose successful voyage led to the foundation of one of the world’s oldest trading corporations, the Hudson’s Bay Company. The magnificent exhibitions: Earth History, Nonsuch, Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as Boreal Forest, Grasslands, and Urban explore the ancient history of Manitoba. But the main treasure of the unique museum is the Urban Gallery, which renders the atmosphere of the streets of Winnipeg in the 1920s with the most complex, high-end modern planetarium projection system.