On 9 March 1252:
Arnold IV Count of Loon and Chiny sold a wood situated between Genk, Zonhoven and Hasselt, known as 'Buscurake', to the Cistercian abbey of Herckenrode near Hasselt.
For the first two centuries the farm of Bokrijk had been cultivated by lay brothers attached to the abbey.

In the second half of the 14th century:
The abbey rented out its 'grangiae' to tenant farmers who worked for half the produce.
In 1447 Bokrijk became an ordinary tenant farm. The abbey remained the owner until the French occupation.

From 1719:
This 'piece of land planted with beech trees next to the water' first appears in the registers under the name of 'Bouchreyck'.

On 22 April 1797:
Bokrijk was sold for 90,000 francs to a resident of Maastricht. It went through frequent changes of ownership in the 19th century.

On 21 March 1938:
Bokrijk was sold on by the Socialist Farmers Co-operative Credit Union to the Province of Limburg. The great promoter of this purchase was the then provincial governor H. Verwilghen, who had for many years cherished the idea of a project that would bring together culture and nature.

On 6 October 1953:
The Provincial Council of the Province of Limburg decided to found an Open Air Museum in Bokrijk, an important and historic decision. With the post-war industrial revolution and the increasing prosperity of the Fifties, there was the imminent threat that Flanders' living environment would very soon be drastically disturbed.
The first conservator, J. Weyns, ensured a scientific approach in developing the Open Air Museum. In the first instance, a building would be thoroughly inspected and dated on the spot, and then disassembled by experts and brought over to Bokrijk. In this way, in less than 20 years some 100 buildings from the Flemish agricultural landscape were saved from destruction. Creating the image of a village that to a great extent came close to historical reality was something groundbreaking in the field of open air museums. The buildings were equipped from the start with objects and equipment in the locations where they belonged .

In 1960:
Work started on building up an urban area known as 'The Old City', with the intention of creating an overview of the evolution of urban architecture from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century. The first section is ready: superb old houses from Antwerp around a town square giving a fine insight into the development of the city in the late Middle Ages, namely the transition from timber to stone construction, and why people left the countryside to try their luck in the city.