Rogatec Open-Air Museum is the largest open air-museum in Slovenia. Due to its cultural, ethnological, landscape, historical, and other exceptional features, it is of great importance to Slovenia, and in 1999 the Government of the Republic of Slovenia, declared  the museum a cultural site of national importance (OG of the Republic of Slovenia, No. 18/99). The museum presents the life and work of farmers and craftsmen at the end of the 19th  and the beginning of the 20th century in the Rogatec area, particularly on the Boč, Donačka Gora and Macelj hills. Fifteen different relocated or reconstructed buildings and associated funktional elements make up the museum space separated into three sections. The homestead section includes the house where poet Jože Šmit was born, with an enclosed garden, an outbuilding with manure pile and an outside toilet, a beehive, pigsties and a traditional Slovene hayrack (kozolec). The commercial area introduces the loden, originally a market shop with assorted goods, today also functioning as a museum shop and administrative premises. The third section is the eating area with a wine cellar functioning as a pušenšank  (a traditional way of allowing farmers to sell their wines directly) and characterised by plantend vines. In 1997, the Rogatec Open-Air Museum was nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award. An enlargement  of the museum is planned (confirmed by the 1998 Regulatory Plan) to present typologically diverse architectural and cultural heritage: the homestead of a smallholder and a stone cutter, a stone cutter's hut as a workroom, a wine cellar and a room for drying fruit and flax. The Rogatec Open-Air Museum is aimed at preserving cultural, architectural, ethnological, landscape and historical values, and presenting culture heritage both in situ and via multimedia; it is also intended for educational, presentational and research work.