The Amber Museum

Palanga Amber Museum (in Lithuanian Palanga Amber Museum),
located in Palanga, by the Baltic Sea, is a branch of the Lithuanian Art
Museum. It is housed in a restored 19th-century building. In
Tiškevičiai Palace, it is surrounded by the Palanga Botanical Garden.
The museum's amber collection consists of about 28,000 exhibits, of
which about 15,000 have insect, spider or plant inclusions and about
4,500 amber products are on display; many of them are works of art
and jewelry.
17th century Amber workshops have been set up in Palanga, and
workshops for this material have been set up in Bruges, Lübeck,
Danzig and Königsberg. 18th c. At the end of the 19th century,
Palanga was the center of the amber industry of the Russian Empire.
Before the First World War, about 2,000 kg of amber raw material
was processed annually in Palanga.
1897 Feliks Tyszkiewicz, a member of an old Ruthenian and
Lithuanian nobility family that has lived in Palanga for a long time,
built a Neo-Renaissance palace, which now houses a museum.
Designed by German architect Franz Heinrich Schwechten, they
collapsed after the First and Second World Wars.
The palace was restored in 1957, according to the plans of the
architect Alfred Brusok.
Botanical Park
Slender trees grow on the slope. It is believed that the Birutė Hill in
the spring is the burial place of Grand Duchess Birutė.
The gardens surrounding the museum cover an area of about 100
hectares. They were designed by the French landscape architect and
botanist Eduard Andre (1840-1911) and his son Rene Eduard Andre,
assisted by the Belgian gardener Buyssen de Coulon. Local historians
estimated that they initially grew about 500 species of trees and
shrubs, some of which were brought from the gardens of Berlin.
There are now about 250 imported and 370 native plant species
growing in the park; 24 of them are included in the 1992 Lithuanian
list of endangered species. Pines and spruces predominate, well
adapted to grow in sandy and peaty soils.
The park has a rose garden, greenhouse, rotunda, spruce, the Snake
Queen, sculpture, Holocaust memorial, ponds; concerts and festivals
take place here in the summer.