Its museums let the visitor participate, not just look. It even celebrates Carnival a week later than everywhere else in the world. It has the flair of a multi-cultural city. Basel has about 30 museums and collections and 100 galleries but its culture is not confined within walls. It bubbles over into the parks, squares, pubs and street festivals much as its fountains bubble into their basins, Winter and Summer.
Art is a living thing here, and the people have never been afraid of the avant-garde.
The city voters okayed a seven-digit credit to buy two paintings by Picasso for the Museum of Fine Arts in 1967. When Picasso heard of this, he donated four more paintings to the city. More of them are on display in the Tinguely Museum, where fantasy meets technology. The Fondation Beyeler is the newest in the museum family, and it's one of those art museums worth a journey in itself. Basel attracted great thinkers long before Erasmus settled here, and in modern times it has produced nine Nobel Prize winners.