Museum der Stadt Füssen im Kloster St. Mang

The Museum der Stadt Füssen occupies rooms in the historic St. Mang monastery complex and presents itself as the city’s institution for conveying local cultural and monastic history.

As early as 1913 a museum association was founded in Füssen and established a district museum of local history in the monastery’s library hall; the city had acquired the monastery building four years earlier and provided the space free of charge. Many exhibits came from donations by citizens. Within a short time the available space proved insufficient, and plans for expansion were initially put on hold by the First World War. After the war the museum fell into neglect and closed for a time, before reopening in 1924 using the library hall, the Papal rooms and the adjoining cloister. After the Second World War the building remained closed for an extended period because windows had been damaged by the blowing up of the Lech bridge and rooms were needed to accommodate refugees; in the early 1950s the museum reopened. In 1989 a comprehensive redesign took place, and since then it has borne the name Museum der Stadt Füssen. In 2024 the museum moved its depot to a building on Spitalgasse, as the monastery offered neither sufficient space nor appropriate storage facilities.

The museum presents exhibitions on the town’s history, on the history of the monastery and on Füssen’s lute- and violin-making tradition. Visitors can, among other sights, visit the Annakapelle and the monastery’s Baroque reception rooms. In 2018 the museum recorded approximately 17,000 visitors; 25.7 percent of them came from abroad (excluding Austria), 8.1 percent from the region (Altlandkreis Füssen and Außerfern).