Offbeat & adult museums in Groningen begin one street back from the shocking pink hull of the Groninger Museum floating on its little island. Here you find cabinets of anatomical oddities, printing presses that once ran off things far racier than wedding invitations, and a few square metres of red-curtained glass that have been part of the city’s fabric since before anyone thought to put a velvet rope around history. This is the Groningen that doesn’t make the postcard: stranger, older and unmistakably adult.
Beyond the Pink Palace
Everyone photographs Mendini’s Groninger Museum from the Verbindingskanaal bridge, and fair enough: it deserves the fuss. But the building trains your eye to expect spectacle, which is the wrong lens for the rest of the city’s collections. Groningen’s smaller museums don’t shout. They sit in merchant houses, university wings and old workshop buildings around the Folkingestraat and Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat area, and they reward visitors who like finding things rather than being shown them. This chapter is for those visitors: the university’s jars of preserved curiosities, the smugglers’ pamphlets, and an honest, respectful look at the city’s small, tolerated red-light corner, all in one afternoon’s wandering.
The Cabinet of Curiosities: University Museum
Tucked into the Academiegebouw complex on Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat, the University Museum traces the University of Groningen’s history back to 1614. For the offbeat-minded, the real draw is the surviving core of an old-fashioned kunst- en rariteitenkabinet, a cabinet of curiosities. Expect preserved anatomical specimens, antique surgical and obstetric instruments, wax models used to teach medical students the body’s less decorous mechanics, and the kind of 18th- and 19th-century scientific ephemera that was genuinely scandalous to display in public at the time. The tone is tasteful and academic, and it’s a reminder that “adult content” in Groningen didn’t start with neon. It started in candlelit lecture halls, with students dissecting things polite society didn’t discuss at dinner. Entry is modest (typically a few euros, often free with a museumkaart), and the place is rarely crowded, so you can linger over the jars without anyone rushing you along.
Ink, Paper and Vice
Groningen has deep roots in printing. As a Hanseatic trading city it naturally bred pamphleteering, and pamphleteering always brings an underground trade in the risqué. The city's small graphic-design and printing museums house the presses, type cases and lithography stones once used to produce everything from Bible tracts to smuggled satirical broadsides, some mocking clergy and nobility in language far too indecent for the very church that had commissioned the original press. Collections have moved between premises and changed their hours over time, so check current opening times before you go. If the history of censorship and underground print grips you more than any painting, ask at the tourist information desk on the Grote Markt about current opening hours, since these collections rotate and aren't staffed every day.
The Living Exhibit: Nieuwstad After Dark
Walk south from the museum quarter toward Nieuwstad and the A-Kerkhof after sunset and you’ll find Groningen’s red-light corner: a handful of softly lit window rooms spread over a couple of quiet side streets. It is nowhere near the scale of Amsterdam’s Wallen, and that is rather the point. This is a small, long-tolerated part of city life, regulated by the municipality under the Netherlands’ licensing system for sex work, and it makes no attempt at tourist spectacle. The women working the windows here are professionals running their own small businesses, and the etiquette is simple and non-negotiable:
- No photographs, ever — not of the windows, not “just