The underground hall
The whole permanent display in one dark, carefully lit space.
Torbjorn Toby Jorgensen — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France — CC BY 2.0 · Thibaut120094 — CC BY 4.0 · Thibaut120094 — CC BY 4.0
With only one afternoon: the **Museum of Art and History** is broader and closer to the old town, and its permanent collection is also free. But if the non-European cultures are specifically what draws you — Africa, Asia, Oceania — the MEG is deeper, more recently staged and far quieter. Practically: save the MEG for a wet day, since it is underground and weather-proof, and keep the clear days for the lake and the mountains.
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Geneva's Museum of Ethnography was founded in 1901 and holds more than seventy-five thousand objects and a hundred and thirty thousand documents from five continents — one of Switzerland's most important anthropological collections. For decades it was stuck in cramped premises, until a **new building** by the practice Graber Pulver opened in 2014: a low block under a sharply folded metal roof, with most of the gallery space buried underground. Three years later it won the **European Museum of the Year Award 2017**. The permanent exhibition, "The Archives of Human Diversity", occupies one large underground hall with around a thousand objects from the five continents, and **entry to it is free** — which alone makes it one of the best deals in Geneva. Beside it sits a less famous treasure: the **International Archive of Folk Music**, founded inside the museum in 1944 by the Romanian ethnomusicologist Constantin Brăiloiu, now holding more than sixteen thousand hours of field recordings from around the world, with a selection you can listen to in the galleries. The museum is in the Plainpalais district south of the Rhône, a short tram 15 ride out, and it is not on the usual tourist circuit — so it stays calm even in summer. Labels are mainly French with partial English, and the tone is self-critical about how these objects were collected in the colonial era; anyone after light visual entertainment may find it earnest. The café and its terrace are open to all without a ticket.
The whole permanent display in one dark, carefully lit space.
Over 16,000 hours of field recordings since 1944.
A folded metal roof over a low block, opened in 2014.
Boulevard Carl-Vogt 65, 1205 Geneva