ARTIS Zoo Tickets: Your Museumkaart Is Worthless at the Gate

ARTIS is Europe’s oldest zoo and the most confusing ticket in Amsterdam, because the city’s two big discount cards do exactly the opposite of what they do everywhere else. Entry is from €29.50 booked online.

The card inversion

• Museumkaart at the zoo gate — nothing. Not free entry, not a reduced rate. Nothing.
• Museumkaart at Micropia and the Groote Museum — covered. Those two are classed as museums and sit on the same site.
• I amsterdam City Card — covers the zoo. The card that fails at the Royal Palace is the one that works here.

If you are choosing between the two cards for a short trip, that pairing is worth working through against your actual list rather than assuming one card wins.

What the zoo ticket includes

Included: the Aquarium and the Planetarium. Both are inside the zoo ticket, which surprises people who expect an aquarium to be charged separately — and both are the answer to a wet Amsterdam afternoon.

Not included: Micropia, the microbe museum, and the Groote Museum. Separate tickets, on the same site, easy to walk past assuming you have already paid for them.

Micropia is the genuinely unusual one — a museum of things too small to see, done well. If you have a Museumkaart it costs you nothing, which is a strange sentence to write about a place whose zoo it is attached to charges you full price.

Source: artis.nl, checked 26 August 2026.

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