The museum of customs and excise tells border stories and explains the activities of customs and excise since 1830. Our completely renewed permanent collection focuses on the four main themes of this story: the officer and his/her administration, the flow of goods, the border and the fraudster/contrabandist. Something is behind every object, every document or every image; a story, about creative minds and trackers, about fraud and the fight against it. It is often an anecdote on cat and mouse games between occasional contrabandists and customs officers, but it may also be the run-down of hard confrontations with professional criminals.
There are many clichés, even falsehoods, on the contribution of Customs and Excise to our society. The customs and excise museum aims at changing this point of view. As mentioned before, our story is based on four main themes: the functioning of Customs and Excise, the flow of goods, the border and fraud.
In addition, we regularly organise temporary exhibitions which focus on certain aspects of Customs and Excise and border stories from now and from the past. Temporary exhibitions give us the opportunity to emphasize on certain aspects from the Customs and Excise heritage which are not or insufficiently dealt with in the permanent collection.