Smithsonian Museums Washington DC: The Complete Free Museum Guide

The Smithsonian Institution is the world's largest museum and research complex, a collection of 19 museums and galleries in Washington DC plus additional facilities in New York, all free to enter and collectively holding over 154 million objects, specimens, and artworks. A lifetime of visits could not exhaust what the Smithsonian offers, making it the most extraordinary cultural gift any democracy has given its citizens and one of the world's great arguments for the public good.

The National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall is the most visited museum in the United States, housing original spacecraft including the Wright Brothers' Flyer, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis, and the Apollo 11 command module that carried the first humans to the Moon and back. The National Museum of Natural History's Hope Diamond and the life-size blue whale suspended from the ceiling are among the most visited objects in any museum anywhere on earth.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture — opened in 2016 in a distinctive bronze-coloured latticed building — documents the full arc of African American experience from slavery to the present day and consistently receives the highest visitor ratings of any museum in the city. Tickets require timed-entry passes booked well in advance online, as demand far exceeds capacity. The Smithsonian Castle on the Mall, the institution's original 1855 building, serves as the visitor information centre and houses the crypt of the British founder James Smithson — whose entire fortune he bequeathed to a nation he never visited.