This museum was created in 2001 as a heritage park dedicated to the technology of metallurgy from the 19th and 20th centuries and also an interdisciplinary theme park. The facility covers an area of 8 hectares where there are two chronologically successive blast furnace plants. The intention of the museum’s creators was to show 2000 years of history of the production of iron – from bloomeries to blast furnaces in the only preserved chronological line in Europe.

The Archeopark has a reconstructed settlement of ancient metallurgy, a historic landscape of an Ancient Polish Industrial Area. The museum also shows the industrial traditions of Starachowice associated with the production of armaments and of post-war trucks such as the “Star”.

Extremely valuable is one of the world’s largest steam engines which made its way to Starachowice from the Universal Industry Exhibition in Paris in 1889. Nature and technology sits side by side and not in name only. In one hall there is a palaeontology exhibition where the most important element is a collection of fossils – traces of animals that lived in the area of the Swietokrzyskie Mountains over 200 million years ago.

The Jan Pazdur Museum of Nature and Technology (Eco-Museum) – Starachowice (woj. Swietokrzyskie)

www.ekomuzeum.pl