Museumpark Orientalis dates back to 1911, making it the oldest open-air museum in the Netherlands. Its original name was Heilig Land Stichting. Its founders were the priest Arnold Suys, the architect Jan Stuyt and the artist Piet Gerrits. Their idea was to allow visitors to walk past sites from the life of Jesus without having to travel to the Middle East to do so. This idea came to them during a joint pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1905. The founders assumed that the then Middle East had hardly changed since Biblical times. To ensure that the reconstructions in this recreated Holy Land were correct, Piet Gerrits continued to live in what is now Jordan between 1906 and 1911 to collect data.