Te Papa Tongarewa

Te Papa Tongarewa — container of treasures in te reo Maori. This is New Zealand's national museum, and it opened on Valentine's Day, nineteen ninety-eight. Thirty-five thousand people showed up on the first day. The building is thirty-six thousand square metres across six floors, and on a windy day it genuinely feels like it might blow into the harbour.

The institution is much older than the building. It started life as the Colonial Museum in eighteen sixty-five, making it over a hundred and sixty years old. Through name changes — Dominion Museum, National Museum — it eventually became Te Papa, and the government decided to build something ambitious on the waterfront. The result cost over three hundred million dollars. It's now the most visited attraction in New Zealand, pulling in over a million visitors a year. And it's free.

The opening ceremony has a good story. Prime Minister Jenny Shipley invited Sir Peter Blake — the legendary yachtsman, fresh from winning the America's Cup — to do the honours. At noon, Blake and two children, five-year-old Tama Whiting and eight-year-old Grace Sweeney, jointly declared Te Papa open. Blake would be murdered three years later by pirates on the Amazon River while on an environmental expedition. He was fifty-three.

Now here's what you need to know about what's inside. Somewhere in this building, in a custom-built tank, sits the largest colossal squid ever caught. Hauled out of the Ross Sea in two thousand and seven by a New Zealand longliner fishing for toothfish. It weighed roughly four hundred and ninety-five kilograms frozen. Its eyes are the size of dinner plates. It has rotating hooks on its tentacle clubs. It is genuinely one of the most terrifying animals on Earth, and you can see it for free.