THE number of visitors to Oxford University's gardens, libraries and museums topped 3.3 million in 2019, new figures reveal.

It was the third year in a row that visitors numbers topped 3 million, with the Ashmolean, Bodleian Libraries and natural history museum all in the UK’s top 50 visitor attractions.

The Ashmolean saw a five per cent rise in visitors to 930,669.

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Numbers were boosted by the introduction of seven-day opening from February 2019 and the museum's most-popular-ever exhibition Last Supper in Pompeii, which attracted 87,280 visitors from July 2019 to January this year.

The museum of natural history saw record-breaking visitor numbers for the fourth year in a row.

Attracting 792,282 people in 2019, the museum is now in the top 50 of UK attractions for the first time.

In the past five years alone, visitor numbers to the museum have increased by 25 per cent.

Its most recent exhibition, First Animals, saw visitor numbers cross the 150,000 mark in January 2020, making it the museum’s most popular exhibition to date.

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The Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum enjoyed its best year ever in 2019, with a mild winter and warm summer helping drive up numbers by 23 per cent to 211,573.

In August alone, 4,473 people visited Harcourt Arboretum, an 81 per cent increase over 2018.

The UK’s oldest botanic garden benefited from a series of major planting projects in 2019.

The Bodleian Libraries welcomed 760,815 visitors in 2019, making it one of the top 50 visitor attractions in the UK.

This is the third year in a row that the libraries have attracted more than 750,000 visitors.

The figures were released by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA).