The Ruhr Museum is a natural and cultural history museum in Essen. The museum is proposed as a memory and showcase of the Ruhr area, a historical industrial territory rich in coal mines and famous for having been occupied by France and Belgium after the First World War, meaning it as a sort of "pledge" of what the German government was to return to France after the War.

The museum documents the nature, culture and history of the region and thus the development of the largest metropolitan area in Europe. The museum collection includes various sectors: those of geology and mineralogy and archeology; a historical sector, with the presentation of work and daily life around 1900 at the height of industrialization; a section dedicated to the representation of the region in the pre-industrial period and finally a rich photographic archive.

The former Ruhrland Museum closed in April 2007 to make way for the new Folkwang Museum buildings. The new Ruhr Museum opened on 20 October 2008 in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Zollverein Coal Mines, rebuilt to a design by Rem Koolhaas.

The museum also organizes temporary exhibitions, conferences, excursions, school workshop projects.