National Immigration History Museum

About

The museum occupies the Palais de la Porte Dorée, built in just eighteen months by architect Albert Laprade for the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition. The building changes names and functions repeatedly over the decades — the Museum of the Colonies and Overseas France in 1932, the Museum of France Overseas in 1935, the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in 1959, and the National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in 1990 — before being listed as a historic monument in 1987. The Établissement public de la Porte Dorée–Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration is created on January 1, 2007, and the museum opens to the public that October. Its formal inauguration follows seven years later, on December 15, 2014, with President François Hollande in attendance. At 293 Avenue Daumesnil in Paris's 12th arrondissement, the 16,000-square-meter building holds more than 1,100 square meters of permanent exhibition space, 450 square meters of educational workshop space, lecture halls, a media library, and a tropical aquarium. It collects, preserves, and exhibits material on the history of immigration to France since the 19th century; in 2019 it recorded 525,594 visitors.