The Nová Paka Museum, founded at the beginning of the 20th century, is famous for its natural science collections on the mineralogy and petrology of the Nová Paka region and its surroundings. The extensive collection of precious stones and semi-precious stones is just as attractive as the fossilized trees from the protohistoric times or the fossils of extinct animals.

The Nová Paka Museum was founded in 1908 by František Jirůtek (1864-1938), a member of the town council and a teacher. Together with other members of the council and local patriots, he participated in successful exhibitions in the area and in the capital, and the Nová Paka museum itself was to become an important exhibition institution in the region. The first exhibits of the museum were donated by the residents themselves or were acquired from other private collections. The natural history collections have gradually become the most important, and today they are dominated especially by the mineralogical and the petrological collections. Most of the approximately 6,500 exhibits in these collections come from the surroundings of Nová Paka and Podkrkonoší. The visitors very much appreciate for example the polished semi-precious stones or the fossilized trees of primeval trees, for which Nová Paka and Podkrkonoší are famous. The museum also has the largest fossilized tree in the Czech Republic, which visitors can see in its full size of 8.3 m within the local geological collection. The prehistoric flora is further represented by horsetails, ferns and conifers and is one of the largest in our territory. The minerals in the collection are mainly agates and jaspers, amethysts, crystals and other precious stones. The mineralogical collection, the so-called Jewel Box, also includes jewellery made from local minerals.

Museum Nová Paka