Most expensive shipwreck museum

The most expensive museum dedicated to a single shipwreck is the Mary Rose Museum in the dockyards at Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK, which cost an estimated £39 million (about $50 million) to build. Built to show off the famous Tudor shipwreck raised from the seabed in 1982 to best effect, allowing visitors to walk through parts of the wooden warship, as well as exhibiting some of the thousands of artefacts excavated from the wreck site, the museum took 10 years to construct and opened to the public on 20 July 2016.

Launched in 1511, the Mary Rose, one of the favourite flagships of King Henry VIII, was sunk by French troops just outside Portsmouth Harbour during the Battle of the Solent on 19 July 1545. Its suspected location only came to light in 1965, 420 years later. Its raising on 11 October 1982 captivated the media and was watched on TV by more than 60 million people around the world.

Ever since it was recovered from the Solent, the remains of the Mary Rose have had to undergo intensive preservation treatment to prevent the delicate wood from deteriorating. For many years it was treated with fresh water to try and remove as much salt as possible from the wood; it was then coated with a type of water-soluble wax (polyethlene glycol, aka PEG) to strengthen the wood. Within the museum, it currently sits inside an enclosed plastic and fibreglass structure known as a "hotbox" within which temperature, light and humidity can be strictly monitored and adjusted.

Another of the world's most famous shipwreck museums, that built to house the Vasa wooden warship in Stockholm, Sweden, cost 200 million SEK (£19 million) to build. Its construction began in late 1987 and it opened on 15 June 1990.