5 Days in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

The Hausbergbahn is a gondola that runs only in winter, and it's the way into Garmisch-Classic from the east end of town. The current gondola dates from 2006.

Expect a crowd at 9:00 on a weekend and a short wait on a Monday. There's a ski rental shop right beside the valley station, and the children's area is at the top.

The Hausberg side is mostly blue runs, and near the top station is the Ixis Kinderland, a children's area with a magic carpet and beginner lifts. It's the gentlest part of the area and the best for a first day, for children, and for the one person in your group who hasn't skied for years.

The lift to know is the Kreuzwankl. In 2025 the 1997 chair, which was the first six-seater in Germany, gave way to an eight-seat Doppelmayr chair costing about 18 million EUR. It's a fast way to lap the mid-mountain runs. By lunch you'll have seen everything the Hausberg offers, and that's the honest verdict: it's a warm-up, not a destination. If the snow is good, look at the Rimmlermoos and Trögl lifts on the east side.

The stadium at the foot of the ski jump was built in 1934 for the 1936 Winter Games, which ran from 6 to 16 February 1936. They were the first Winter Olympics with alpine skiing. It held 40,000 spectators. The Games were also a showcase for the Nazi regime, and the facts around them are plain: Garmisch and Partenkirchen were merged by force in 1935, and, ahead of the visitors, the regime took down antisemitic signs and let the Jewish athlete Rudi Ball play for the German hockey team. Twelve days after the Games closed, German troops marched into the Rhineland.

The stadium was rebuilt in 1939 for the 1940 Games, which Garmisch received after Sapporo and St. Moritz withdrew, and the war cancelled them. Today you can walk in freely, and standing at the bottom of the ski jump gives you the scale.

The New Year's ski jump has been held here since 1922, and the hill takes its name from 1936, when the Norwegian Birger Ruud won the Olympic jump with 75.0 and 74.5 m in front of 130,000 spectators. The old wooden tower was blown up in April 2007 and the current jump opened that December. Now the best jumpers fly about 145 m: the hill record is 145.5 m, set in qualifying on 31 December 2025. The jump is the second of the four events in the Four Hills Tournament, after Oberstdorf and before Innsbruck and Bischofshofen. In 2026/27 the women compete on 31 December (event page: competition at 14:00) and the men on 1 January 2027, a Friday (practice round at 15:00, competition at 16:30, gates open at 12:00). The times can change, so check the tournament site before you buy.

The restaurant at Klammstraße 19 is in the 2026 Michelin Guide Germany as a €€ country-cooking address, with a two-course set lunch at a reasonable price. A Stub'n is a traditional parlor, and the point is a Bavarian dinner in one. Most listings show it open every day, which matters on a Monday, when Husar and many other places are shut.

Order from the regional end of the menu, and ask for a Bavarian beer with it. Reserve a table.

The Bavarian Zugspitze Railway was built in 1928-1930 and opened in three stages: Grainau to Eibsee on 19 February 1929, Garmisch to Grainau that December, and the rest on 8 July 1930. It starts in Garmisch at 705 m and climbs 1,945 m over 19 km, the biggest height difference of any railway in Europe, and it's the highest railway in Germany. The lower half runs outdoors, the upper half in a tunnel.

In 1987 a new branch, the Rosi Tunnel, opened to the Zugspitzplatt plateau, named after the skier Rosi Mittermaier, who was its tunnel patron. It ends at the glacier station, 2,588 m up, in the middle of the ski area. Take it up rather than the cable car: you arrive among the runs, and the cable car down is the better view.

The plateau is 20 km of runs between 2,000 and 2,700 m: 7 km easy, 13 km intermediate and none advanced. The slopes are on the Schneefernerkopf, the Wetterwandeck and the Zugspitze itself, and the lifts include the Sonnenkar and Wetterwandeck chairs. Skiing here means wide, open slopes with Alpine views and the likeliest snow in Germany, but it's a one-day area, not a week-long one.

One honest note: this is called a glacier ski area, and parts of the runs do cross the Northern Schneeferner, Germany's largest glacier, though it has shrunk to about 31 hectares and the operators pile snow on it and cover it in summer to slow the melt. The Southern Schneeferner lost its glacier status in 2022, and the Schneefernerkopf lift, last used in 2023/24, was dismantled from 20 March 2026. Go for the snow and the setting, not the ice.

The SonnAlpin restaurant stands above the glacier station at 2,588 m, in the middle of the runs, which makes it the obvious lunch stop on the plateau. It opened in the late 1980s with the Rosi Tunnel.

At midday every skier on the plateau has the same idea, so eat early or late, and order something warm: a soup, Käsespätzle (cheese noodles) or a sausage, if the menu has them.

The Zugspitze-Gletscherbahn takes about four minutes from the plateau to the summit, running about every ten minutes. At 2,962 m you're on Germany's highest point, and the Austrian border runs over the west summit; the checkpoint that stood there is no longer staffed. The first recorded ascent was on 27 August 1820 by the surveyor Josef Naus.

The golden summit cross stands on the east summit; the current replica, 4.88 m tall, has been there since 2009.

The Seilbahn Zugspitze drops from the summit to the Eibsee in about ten minutes, and it set three records when it opened on 21 December 2017: 1,945 m of height in a single section, the longest free span between supports (3,213 m) and the tallest steel pylon (127 m). It replaced the 1962 cable car, whose opening was a fiasco: on the first trip a journalist bumped a control cabinet and every brake locked. The new one cost about 50 million EUR and each cabin carries 120 passengers.

Ride it down. At the bottom is the Eibsee, the lake at the foot of the mountain, and the cog train stops there too. Bus 323 runs hourly from the Eibsee through Garmisch to Partenkirchen.

The Alpspitzbahn opened in 1973 and is still the last lift built to reach Garmisch-Classic from the valley. It climbs to the Osterfelderkopf, around 2,050 m, the top of the area, below the 2,628 m Alpspitze.

Go early: queues at the valley station are shortest before 9:00. A cloudy morning in town can mean sun at the top, but the weather also turns first up here, so check the webcams.

The Alpspitz side is the high part of the Garmisch-Classic area. The Osterfelderkopf T-bar, the Bernadein lifts and the Längenfelder chair serve its runs, and a ski route between the Hochalm and the Kreuzeckhaus links this side with Kreuzeck. That makes today a tour across two mountains and not just lift laps.

It's a small area, so don't expect a different line every time. The point of the day is the elevation and the route over to Kreuzeck for lunch.

The Kreuzalm is a family hut at 1,600 m, in the middle of the Kreuzeck ski and walking area, with the Kreuzeckbahn in sight. Its own site says it's open daily from 9:00 to 18:00 with regional cooking and a big sun terrace, closed only during lift maintenance and in very bad weather in summer.

Ask for Brotzeit, the Bavarian snack plate of bread with cheese and cold cuts, if it's on the menu. It's also the hut to use on the Kreuzeck day on Thursday.

The operator advertises four valley runs, the long ones that take you down toward town. A rating site measures the longest, from the Osterfelderkopf, at close to 9 km, but only the operator's piste report tells you whether it's open. Lower runs depend on snow, and on snowmaking and cold nights when it's thin, so ask in the morning.

Take it slowly in the afternoon, when the light flattens and the lower snow softens. If the valley run is closed, the cable car is the way down.

The Husar at Fürstenstraße 25 is listed in the Michelin Guide as a €€€ classic-cuisine inn. The listing says the inn has stood there for over 400 years and that the Merget family has run it since 2004. Sources agree it serves dinner from about 18:00 from Tuesday to Saturday and is shut on Sunday and Monday, so Wednesday is a safe night.

This is the nicer dinner of the trip, with a classic menu rather than a mountain-hut one. Book a table, and don't expect speed: a long dinner is the point.

Skiing in the Classic area began with the Kreuzeckbahn in 1926, the first aerial tramway in the German Alps. The current gondola replaced the old cable car in 2002 and carries you to the Kreuzeck, at 1,651 m. In 1936 the Olympic downhill finished here.

It's the lift for the Kandahar and the Kreuzeck runs, so be early. The valley station is on Am Kreuzeckbahnhof, 3.8 km by road from Marienplatz.

The Kandahar is the run Garmisch is known for, and the Arlberg-Kandahar races have been held here since 1954. The World Cup has come to it every year since the 1969/70 season; the Alpine World Championships were held in Garmisch in 1978 and 2011. The Kandahar-Express chair (2009) serves it.

The top section has a very steep pitch, the Trögelhang, and you can skip it by leaving the chair at its middle station. Most intermediate skiers do, and nobody will think less of you. Ski it early, while it's groomed and empty, and it's for confident intermediates and up: beginners should stay on the Hausberg. It ends close to town, so after mid-March the bottom third is the first part to go thin. In 2027 the men race on 20 and 21 February and the women on 27 and 28 February, when the slope won't be open to the public.

After the Kandahar, the Hexenkessel chair serves the runs near the Kreuzeck top station, a good place to spend the afternoon at your own pace. Hexenkessel means "witches' cauldron", and it's also the name of the run beneath the chair.

If your legs are tired after the Kandahar, this is where to spend the afternoon rather than going back to the steep pitch. Check the piste report for the day's open runs.

Krönner at Achenfeldstraße 1 is a family confectioner and café, open Monday to Saturday from 9:30 to 18:30 in the café, according to its own site. The shop sells chocolate, pralines and Baumkuchen (a layered tree-ring cake), and it ships them.

Go for Kaffee und Kuchen, the afternoon ritual of coffee and cake. It's a short walk from Marienplatz, and a good way to end a ski day before the evening stroll.

Garmisch's old center is Marienplatz, where the baroque New Church (Neue Kirche) was finished in 1752. It was built with stones from Werdenfels Castle, the fortress on a crag north of town where the Freising prince-bishops' warden ruled and where the accused were held during the witch trials of 1589-1596, in which 63 people, more than a tenth of the population, were executed. The castle was abandoned in the 17th century and largely torn down in the 1750s.

The Alte Kirche (old church), a few minutes' walk north, is Gothic, was used as a storehouse, armory and hay barn for years, and has been consecrated again. Some of its medieval frescoes are still visible.

The Klamm (Partnach Gorge) is 702 m long and more than 80 m deep, carved by the Partnach, a stream fed from the Schneeferner glacier on the Zugspitzplatt. It was made a natural monument in 1912 and has been open to visitors all year since. When it freezes hard, ice curtains hang from the walls and the waterfalls, and that's the winter reason to come. Town buses reach the Olympic stadium, and from there the Widenauerstraße leads to the gorge entrance.

For centuries, loggers floated firewood down the gorge from the Reintal to Partenkirchen until the 1960s, and men died freeing jammed trunks; plaques on the path between the stadium and the entrance recall them. In 1991 a rockfall of about 5,000 cubic meters blocked the old path, and since 1992 a 108 m tunnel with windows bypasses it.

The family bakery at Ludwigstraße 7 was founded on 1 December 1886 by the master baker Anton Sieß and is in its fifth generation. It's a craft bakery, with bread, rolls, cakes, tortes and pastry, and a café.

Buy a Brezn (pretzel) and a slice of cake and eat them on the street. The opening hours are Tuesday to Friday from 6:30 to 18:00 and Saturday from 6:00 to 12:30; Sunday and Monday are closed, and holidays can change that.

Ludwigstraße follows the old Roman road from the Brenner to Augsburg and is the market street of Partenkirchen. The painted facades, the Lüftlmalerei, are what people come to see. The word probably comes from the house Zum Lüftl in Oberammergau, the home of the façade painter Franz Seraph Zwinck (1748-1792), and it's a folk version of Baroque trompe-l'oeil: false windows, saints, hunting scenes, sundials and mottos.

The honest version is that this isn't medieval. Great fires in 1811 and 1865 wiped out the old streetscape, and only two older houses survive, the Altes Haus at number 8 and the Wackerlehaus at number 47. Most of the painted fronts date from the early 20th century, in the Heimatstil (a "homeland" style), and murals by Heinrich Bickel did a lot to make the street look the way visitors expected. It's a lovely street, but it was dressed for visitors.

The district museum at Ludwigstraße 47 is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 17:00, and on Monday only if it's a public holiday. The address is the one the heritage listing gives for the Wackerlehaus, one of the two houses that survived the fires. Admission for an adult is 5.50 EUR on its site, and parking in the underground garage is free for two hours.

Through 14 February 2027 it shows Vergessene Künstlerinnen (forgotten women artists) and an art intervention in the historic rooms titled Denken über die Dinge. Skip it if you want only the mountains, but it's a small museum that suits one rainy hour.

The pilgrimage church of St. Anton stands above Partenkirchen. A chapel was replaced from 1704 as thanks for the town being spared in the War of the Spanish Succession, and the church was consecrated in 1708 and extended in 1734-36. The ceiling frescoes, the only surviving dome painting by Johann Evangelist Holzer, are described as among the finest of the 18th century in Bavaria.

The Philosophenweg starts nearby, a path with benches carrying quotations from philosophers that leads toward Farchant, about 5 km in all. In winter, walk a short stretch for the view over the valley and turn back: you don't need the whole thing.

The Fraundorfer at Ludwigstraße 24 is a family inn that's been in business for 95 years. The restaurant is open Monday and Thursday to Sunday from 17:00, and closed Tuesday and Wednesday. The kitchen closes at 21:00. Every evening from Thursday to Monday at 19:00 there's free Bavarian music with Schuhplattler (the slap-dancing) and yodeling.

The 2026 menu covers the national dishes in one sitting: breaded pork Schnitzel at 19.50 EUR, a veal Wienerschnitzel at 28.50 EUR, Sauerbraten with bread dumplings at 22 EUR, Kaiserschmarrn (a shredded caramelized pancake) at 15.50 EUR and Apfelstrudel at 7.50 EUR. It's touristy, and it knows it, but the food is the real thing and the portions are large.