Europe Has The World's Only Museum Where Visitors Travel Through A Super-Sized Human Body

Not far from the charming canal-veined center of Leiden in the Netherlands, an enormous 115-foot-tall seated figure rises from the ground, its rust-orange shell attached to (and sliced in two by) a boxy glass-fronted tower drawing the gaze of most who drive by. Inside this striking architectural ensemble is CORPUS, a unique museum that allows visitors to journey through the anatomy of a giant human body by quite literally stepping inside to explore the various organs and systems that keep the body alive. It achieves this by casting visitors as a red blood cell, taking part in immersive presentations, games, and intriguing displays from the lower body to the brain.

While close enough to Leiden to visit easily (it's just a 5-minute drive from the city center), the museum is actually located in Oegstgeest and is well connected to the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, too. From Amsterdam, take the train to Leiden from Amsterdam Zuid and then change to one of the several bus options, and jump off at the Wassenaarseweg/Corpu bus stop. The entire journey should take around 45 minutes, while it's generally a bit less than 10 minutes by bus directly from Leiden. Leiden, with its dainty flower-lined canals, vibrant streets, and lively cafe culture, is worth a stop in its own right, but it's also a quiet base from which to visit stunning destinations like the blissful Keukenhof tulip gardens in nearby Lisse, reachable via the express Keukenhof bus in about 30 minutes. You can reach Leiden in around 17 minutes from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, which is the closest major airport to the CORPUS Museum.

Opened in 2008, CORPUS offers an immersive, fascinating, yet equally bizarre, science-meets-art experience unlike your average museum and a world apart from the pretty streets and canals of Leiden. But while the museum is perhaps a little bit strange, it has a worthy focus to get children, via engagement with immersive theme-park-like experiences, to better look after their health and bodies.

It's a relatively short museum experience with guided tours typically taking around one hour, and the concepts are portrayed simply enough for families with even smaller children to understand. Visitors begin the tour by entering, via an escalator, into a wound around the lower leg of the giant figure. There, visitors are shown what happens when a splinter pierces the skin. After this, the surreal journey winds through the human stomach, lungs, brain, and heart with displays of bodily functions such as digestion featuring blocks of cheese (what else, this is the Netherlands, with all its wonderful cheese culture, after all), as well as interactive games and machinery to measure things like blood pressure and BMI (body mass index).

A highlight at the CORPUS Museum is the lifelike models of all the various bits and pieces of a human body presented in a grotesquely engorged form and bathed in vivid lighting, adding to the atmosphere. Standout moments on the tour include the distinctive thud of a heartbeat through the chambers of the heart, the portrayal of neurons firing across the brain, and the rhythmic expansion of the lungs filling up with oxygen, each a striking, sensory lesson in how our bodies function.