Prague’s famous museums are the ones everybody lists. This page is about the other end of the collection: the illusion rooms, the alchemists, two separate torture museums, a gallery of David Černý’s sculptures in a former factory, and a museum of historical chamber pots.
Prices and hours below were checked against each museum’s own website in September 2026. Where a museum does not publish its prices, we say so rather than guess.
Sex Machines Museum
Melantrichova 476/18, Old Town · daily 10:00–23:00 · 350 CZK · strictly 18+, ID required
Three floors and 350 objects, most of them nineteenth- and early twentieth-century devices, presented as social history rather than as a joke — chastity belts, anti-masturbation apparatus from the era when doctors prescribed it, and machines whose engineering is genuinely impressive and slightly alarming. There is a small cinema showing early erotic film.
It is thirty seconds from Old Town Square and the queue outside is usually people daring each other to go in. Allow forty minutes. The age check is real.
IAM Illusion Art Museum
Melantrichova 536/2 · daily 09:00–20:00, to 23:00 in summer · 350 CZK Mon–Thu, 390 CZK Fri–Sun (concessions 250/290, under 6 free)
Anamorphic 3D installations, reversed-perspective paintings, lenticulars, stereograms and light art, several of them built around Czech historical subjects. Almost everything is designed to be stood in and photographed, which is the point — this is a museum you leave with sixty pictures of yourself.
It is on the same short street as the Sex Machines Museum, which makes for an unusual afternoon.
Museum of Senses
Jindřišská 939/20 · daily 09:00–20:00, year round · 390 CZK adult, 290 concessions, family from 890 CZK
Fifty-plus interactive exhibits over one to two hours: the RGB room where colour separates under different light, a bed of 1,209 nails you actually lie on, an Ames room that makes one person a giant, an infinity mirror disco, and a head-on-a-platter illusion that children find far funnier than adults do. Open on public holidays, which is useful when the state museums are shut.
Muzeum fantastických iluzí
Galerie Myšák, Vodičkova 31/710 · open every day including public holidays · prices not published online
More than 150 trick-art exhibits — magic chairs, rooms that turn you into a giant or a dwarf, levitation frames, mirror chambers. It overlaps heavily with the Museum of Senses two streets away; pick one rather than both.
The Invisible Exhibition
Novoměstská radnice, Karlovo náměstí 1/23 (entrance from Vodičkova) · tours start every fifteen minutes
An hour in total darkness, guided by blind and visually impaired staff. You cross a street, shop in a small grocery, sit in a café and pay for a drink — all without seeing anything. It is the most affecting thing on this page and the only one that changes how you think afterwards. The venue also runs dinners and wine tastings in the dark.
Go with someone. It is disorienting alone, and the point is partly the conversation afterwards.
Museum of Prague Ghosts and Legends
Mostecká 18, Malá Strana · daily 10:00–22:00
A cellar of Prague’s legends staged as tableaux — the headless Templar of Liliová Street, the water goblin, the burning woman of Karlova. It is aimed squarely at children and it is better than it needs to be, largely because the legends themselves are good. Open until ten, which makes it a rare evening option.
Museum of Alchemists and Magicians of Old Prague
Mostecká 18 · daily 10:00–20:00
Same address as the ghosts, same operator. A reconstructed alchemist’s laboratory in the attic of a house associated with Edward Kelley, the English alchemist Rudolf II eventually imprisoned. Prague’s alchemical century is real history badly served by souvenir shops, and this is a reasonable introduction to it. The operator also runs an alchemist-themed pub, Kellyxír, at Jánský vršek 8.
Musoleum — David Černý’s gallery
Nádražní 2, Smíchov · Mon–Fri 13:00–19:00, Sat–Sun 10:00–18:00
Five floors and 1,200 square metres of the artist responsible for the crawling babies on the Žižkov tower, the horse hanging upside down in the Lucerna passage and the rotating head of Kafka. The permanent installation runs from his earliest work to pieces never shown publicly, plus his architectural projects. If you have been photographing his sculptures around the city without knowing whose they were, this is the explanation.
Madame Tussauds Prague
Celetná 6 · Sun–Thu 10:00–20:00, Fri–Sat 10:00–21:00, last entry 45 minutes before closing · 350 CZK adult, 250 concessions, family 900 CZK on site only
The Prague edition leans local: Czech figures alongside the international ones, which is more interesting than it sounds if you have just spent a week reading Czech names on plaques. Straightforward, photogenic, and busy at weekends.
Museum of Miniatures
Strahov Monastery, Strahovské nádvoří 11 · daily 10:00–17:00 · 150 CZK adult, 100 CZK concessions
Twenty-nine works viewed through microscopes: a gold bicycle standing on the eye of a sewing needle, a caravan of camels inside the eye of another. The collection is by three artists — Aldunin, Ter Ghazarian and Koněnko — and it is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Fifteen minutes, and it costs less than a coffee on Old Town Square. Trams 22 and 23 to Pohorˇelec.
Museum of Bricks
Národní 31 · prices and hours on the museum’s ticket portal
Around 9,000 exhibits built from roughly ten million LEGO pieces — billed as the world’s largest private collection, assembled by Miloš Křeček over a lifetime. There is a second Prague-adjacent branch and a hotel in Kutná Hora with LEGO in every room.
And the genuinely obscure
Five more that exist, that we have located, and whose hours you should confirm before setting out:
- Museum of Historical Chamber Pots and Toilets — exactly what it says, and a surprisingly serious social history of sanitation.
- Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments and a second Museum of Torture — two separate operations in the centre. Grim, dimly lit, popular with teenagers.
- Old Times Museum, Valdštejnská 150/4 — a hoarder’s collection of everyday objects from the last century and a half.
- Pinball Museum 1990, Celetná 558/12 — a hundred playable machines; the ticket is unlimited play rather than a per-game charge.
- Mineralia Gemstone Museum, Havlíčkova 1029/3 — Bohemian garnet and the Czech mineral collections, next to Masáryk station.
Making an afternoon of it
Three of these — Sex Machines, IAM Illusion and Madame Tussauds — are within four minutes’ walk of each other around Melantrichova and Celetná, which is the densest concentration of odd museums in Europe and almost certainly not planned. The Malá Strana pair (ghosts and alchemists) share one door on Mostecká on the way to the Charles Bridge. Musoleum and the Museum of Miniatures are the two worth a deliberate journey.
Most of these are commercial museums: they open on Mondays and on public holidays when the state collections close, which makes them the sensible answer to a wet Monday in Prague.
