The unusual park-museum Gletschergarden, which translates as "Glacier Garden", has been operating in Lucerne since the 19th century. It is very easy to find: it is located next to the famous monument "Dying Lion", dedicated to the soldiers who died for the French kings - Charles IX and Louis XVI. This memorial is one of the symbols of Lucerne.
The Gletscher Park-Museum is a park that houses the former residence of the Amrein family. This house was rebuilt for the museum.
The idea for the museum came from Josef Wilhelm Amrein-Troller when he was supervising the construction of a wine cellar and accidentally discovered the remains of a prehistoric glacier. Excavations at this site continued until 1876. All the finds are now preserved in the Glacier Museum. It is an extensive collection of fossils, which are 20 million years old. At that time the site of Lucerne was a tropical sea. Most of the stones with imprints of ancient insects, leaves of plants that no longer exist were found in the glaciers. Also in the park you can see huge glacial pits - deep depressions with steep edges, which were formed due to the descent of the glacier.
In addition, the museum displays reduced copies of houses and various buildings characteristic of different parts of Switzerland, a reconstruction of the battle between Russian and French troops in 1799, which used a lot of tin soldiers, a volumetric map of the Alps, compiled by scientist L. Pfeiffer.
Another attraction of the park-museum is the Alhambra, a mirror maze in the Moorish style, created in the late 19th century for the national exhibition in Geneva and moved to Lucerne in 1899.
