5 Days in Munich

Start with the view, before the crowds. St. Peter's is the oldest recorded parish church in Munich, and its tower, known as Alter Peter ("Old Peter"), stands on the hill where the city began: a church was here before Munich was founded in 1158. The church was almost completely destroyed in the Second World War, with only a stump of the tower left, and its reconstruction took until 2000. The tower is still the best place to get your bearings.

It's about 300 steps up a narrow staircase, with no lift, to a platform at 56 meters. From there you look straight down on Marienplatz and across to the domes of the Frauenkirche, and when the warm Alpine wind called Föhn is blowing, the mountains show up on the horizon. Inside, a glass coffin holds the relics of Saint Munditia.

Munich's best-known table rule: Weißwurst, the pale veal sausage, is a morning food, and the saying goes that it shouldn't hear the noon bells. A popular story says a butcher invented it by accident at an inn on Marienplatz in 1857, though a city archivist has found a print from 1814 that already shows Munich people eating them, so the legend is a bit too neat. Either way, the Weisses Bräuhaus on Tal, on the original site of the Schneider Weisse brewery, serves the full ritual every day from 9 to 12: two sausages in a bowl of hot water, a Brezn, sweet mustard and a wheat beer.

You eat it without the skin. Slice the sausage open lengthwise and peel it back, or do it the old way, called zuzeln, and suck the filling out of the casing.

Be on Marienplatz at 11. The big building on the north side looks medieval, but the New Town Hall (Neues Rathaus) was built in three stages from 1867 into the early 1900s in the neo-Gothic style by Georg von Hauberrisser. The Glockenspiel in its tower has 43 bells and tells two stories in figures: the upper level shows the wedding of Duke Wilhelm V in 1568, with a joust on this square, and the lower one shows the Schäfflertanz, the dance the coopers are said to have done to cheer people up after the plague.

It is charming for a few minutes, and the crowd makes it hard to see. The column in the middle, the Mariensäule, was put up in 1638 in thanks that Munich survived the Thirty Years' War.

Two minutes from Marienplatz, the Frauenkirche is the symbol of the city. It's a plain red-brick Gothic hall church, built in about twenty years from 1468, with two towers just under 99 meters tall. The domes on top were added around 1525, because the money for pointed spires had run out. A rule agreed after a local vote in 2004 keeps new buildings in the city below the height of the towers, which is why they still dominate the skyline.

Look for the dark footprint near the entrance, which legend says the devil left. The south tower is the point of the visit: 86 steps, then a lift, to a glassed-in platform at 80 meters.

Three minutes south, the Viktualienmarkt has been the food market of the old town for over 200 years: dozens of stalls of fruit, cheese, fish, flowers and spices, and stands that turn it into the town canteen at lunchtime. Eat the Munich way. Get a Leberkässemmel, a roll with a hot slice of Leberkäse (no liver and no cheese in it, just a baked loaf of pork and beef), or a Brezn with Obatzda, a spread of ripe Camembert, butter and paprika.

Then take it to the beer garden in the middle of the market, where the beer comes from the six big Munich breweries in rotation. Six fountains honor local comedians and folk singers, including Karl Valentin, the dry-witted cabaret star Munich still quotes.

Walk five minutes west along Sendlinger Straße to the Asamkirche. From the street it is eight meters wide and easy to miss. Inside it is the most over-the-top room in Munich. The brothers Cosmas Damian and Egid Quirin Asam built it between 1733 and 1746 as their own private church, next to their house, so there was nobody to tell them to stop, and every inch is gilded, painted or carved.

On the way back toward Marienplatz, stop at St. Michael on the pedestrian street. It's a Renaissance church finished in 1597, with a barrel vault 20 meters wide, and in the crypt lie about thirty Wittelsbachs, including King Ludwig II, whose coffin is usually covered in flowers.

Finish at the most famous beer hall in the world, the Hofbräuhaus. Duke Wilhelm V founded his own court brewery in 1589, brewing began on this spot in 1607-08, and Ludwig I opened it to the public in 1828. The building you see dates from 1897; it was badly damaged in the war and rebuilt, and the vaulted ground-floor hall, the Schwemme, is the part that survived. It is one of the biggest tourist magnets in Munich, yet it still has regulars who keep their own mugs there, and it earns its reputation: a brass band, long shared tables and beer in one-liter glass mugs, called a Maß.

Order roast pork knuckle (Schweinshaxe) or sausages with Brezn.

The hall has a darker footnote. On 24 February 1920 the young Nazi party presented its program to a crowd of around 2,000 in the festival hall upstairs.

The Residenz is the largest city palace in Germany and the home of the Wittelsbach dukes, electors and kings. It grew over six centuries, from a fortress the citizens of Munich had to pay for in 1385 as punishment for a failed uprising, to a complex with ten courtyards and about 130 rooms in the styles of the Renaissance, baroque, rococo and neoclassicism. Bombs badly damaged it in 1944, and it was rebuilt over decades.

The museum takes you through state apartments, the long Renaissance hall called the Antiquarium and the Ancestors' Gallery, and the Treasury holds crowns, jewels and goldsmiths' work. The Cuvilliés Theatre, a rococo jewel box whose carved interior was dismantled and stored during the war, needs its own ticket. If you only do one, do the museum, and use the free audio guide.

Walk out of the Residenz onto Odeonsplatz, the most Italian corner of Munich. The yellow Theatinerkirche was built from 1663 by Elector Ferdinand Maria and his wife Henriette Adelaide of Savoy in thanks for the birth of their long-awaited heir. The rococo facade came a century later.

Next to it is the Feldherrnhalle, a loggia copied from Florence and built in 1841-44 for Ludwig I. On 9 November 1923 the police stopped Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch here in a gunfight that killed four police officers, more than a dozen putschists and a bystander. After 1933 the Nazis made it a shrine, with a guard of honor, and passers-by were expected to give the Nazi salute. Many people went around by the narrow lane behind it instead, nicknamed Drückebergergasse, "shirkers' lane". A line of bronze cobbles set into the paving of Viscardigasse in 1995 marks that detour.

Five minutes from the Theatinerkirche, on Brienner Straße, Café Luitpold has been a Munich coffee house since 1888. It's a grand room with a palm court, a counter of handmade chocolates and cakes, and a long breakfast menu. It is a good place for a late lunch or for coffee and a slice of Prinzregententorte, the Bavarian layer cake named after Prince Regent Luitpold, who ruled from 1886 to 1912. Nobody agrees who actually invented it.

On the way to the park you cross the Hofgarten, the formal court garden with arcades between the Residenz and the English Garden. It's a good place for a sit-down with a coffee.

Cross the Hofgarten and walk east to the southern tip of the English Garden, past the Haus der Kunst, which was built in 1933-37 as the Nazis' showcase gallery and is now a museum of contemporary art. Behind it, the Eisbach, a small side-stream of the Isar, rushes under a bridge and forms a standing wave that river surfers have ridden for decades. It is one of the oddest sights in any city: people in wetsuits taking turns on a wave beside a park path.

Stand on the little bridge directly over the wave to see them from above. Surfing has been allowed again since May 2026, for experienced river surfers only. Late afternoon is the best light.

The English Garden was laid out from 1789 as a park for everyone, not just the court, which was a radical idea at the time, and at roughly 375 hectares it is one of the biggest city parks in the world. Walk north along the stream to the Monopteros, a little Greek temple on a hill, designed by Leo von Klenze in the 1830s. The view back over the lawns to the towers of the old town is the best free view in Munich, and in the evening the grass below it fills with picnic blankets, guitars and bicycles.

Nearby are the Japanese tea house, built for the 1972 Olympics, and the Kleinhesseloher See, where you can rent a rowing boat in season. The north, beyond the lake, is much quieter than the south.

Walk five minutes north to the Chinese Tower, a 25-meter wooden pagoda built in 1789-90, which burned down in a bombing raid in 1944 and was rebuilt in 1952. Around it is one of the biggest beer gardens in Bavaria, with about 7,000 seats and a brass band that plays on the tower's balcony on some days of the week.

Self-service is the norm: queue for the beer, take a table, and either buy food at the counters (roast chicken, Obatzda, pretzels) or bring your own picnic. Beer gardens started in Munich in the 19th century, when brewers planted chestnut trees over their cellars to keep the beer cool, and the bring-your-own-food rule is a leftover of the compromise reached when smaller breweries complained that the big ones were selling food too.

Munich's picture galleries sit together in the Kunstareal, an art quarter of about 18 museums on a few city blocks, and the Alte Pinakothek is the one for the old masters. Opened in 1836, it holds more than 700 paintings from the 13th to the 18th century. Head for Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait of 1500, in which he paints himself in a pose usually used for Christ; Leonardo's Madonna of the Carnation; Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne; and the Rubens room, with canvases more than six meters high.

The Neue Pinakothek next door has been closed for renovation since 2018, with no firm reopening date (2030 is often quoted), and a selection of its 19th-century masterpieces is shown on the ground floor of the Alte Pinakothek meanwhile. The Lenbachhaus, on Königsplatz, has the biggest collection of the Blue Rider group in the world.

Walk about ten minutes west to Königsplatz, a Greek-style square laid out for Ludwig I between 1816 and 1845: the Propylaea gate, the Glyptothek for ancient sculpture and the Antikensammlungen opposite. Munich was nicknamed Isar-Athen ("Athens on the Isar") for this kind of architecture.

This is also the place where Nazi Germany staged its mass rallies. The Nazi party's headquarters, the Brown House, stood a block away, the regime built two "honor temples" here for the Nazis killed in the 1923 putsch, and books were burned on the square in 1933. The US Army blew up the temples in 1947, but their platforms are still there. Two buildings the Nazis put up beside the temples survive. The Führerbau, where the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938, is now a music university, and the other houses an art history institute.

The NS-Dokumentationszentrum stands where the Brown House stood. It opened on 30 April 2015, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Munich, and its permanent exhibition, Munich and National Socialism, asks how the Nazi party grew in this city, how Hitler came to power, how democracy failed and what led to exclusion, war and murder. The Nazis named Munich the "capital of the movement", and the center also looks at how the city has dealt with that past since 1945.

It's a sober, well-made exhibition, not a spectacle, and it is free. A media guide runs on your own phone, so bring headphones.

Take the U-Bahn via the main station to Theresienwiese (U4/U5). Most of the year it is an enormous, mostly empty meadow, and for a little over two weeks from mid-September it is the home of the Oktoberfest. The first Oktoberfest was held here in 1810 for the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese, which is where the "Wiesn" ("Therese's meadow") gets its name.

Above it stands the Bavaria, a bronze woman 18.5 meters tall, designed by Ludwig Schwanthaler for Ludwig I and cast by Ferdinand von Miller in 1850. You can climb a steep, narrow spiral staircase into her head and look out through small openings over the meadow and the skyline. Behind her, the Hall of Fame holds busts of Bavarian notables.

A twenty-minute walk north from the meadow is the Augustiner-Keller, a beer cellar and garden of the Augustiner brewery, which counts 1328 as its founding year (historians can't prove the exact date) and is the oldest brewery in Munich still operating. Many locals rate Augustiner as the best beer in town, and the house specialty here is Edelstoff poured from a wooden barrel. The big beer garden is one of the best known in the city, but the kitchen works all year round, with several traditional rooms indoors.

Order a Helles and a roast pork knuckle or Schweinsbraten with a Knödel and gravy, and share a table with strangers. In winter, from mid-November, the garden also puts up shepherd's wagons and an ice-stock hut that groups can reserve.

Start where every photograph of Neuschwanstein is taken: the Marienbrücke, an iron footbridge high above the Pöllat gorge. A first wooden bridge was built here in the 1840s under Ludwig II's father, Maximilian II, and the bridge is named for Ludwig's mother, Queen Marie. Below it a waterfall drops into the gorge, and across the gorge the castle sits on its ridge.

A shuttle bus runs from car park P4, below Hohenschwangau Castle, to a stop five minutes from the bridge, with no fixed timetable but roughly every 20 minutes, and takes about 15 minutes. From the bridge it's a steep 15-minute walk down to the castle entrance. You can also walk from the village, which takes about 45 minutes.

Neuschwanstein was Ludwig II's private fantasy: a medieval castle built from 1869, partly as a tribute to the composer Richard Wagner, in the mountains far from the court in Munich. He paid for it with his own fortune and a lot of borrowed money, and he died in 1886, before it was finished. It opened to the public soon after. It's said to have inspired Disney's Sleeping Beauty castle, and since 2025 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Ludwig II's palaces.

The tour is brisk. Guides in German and English take you through 14 rooms in about 30 minutes, and the tours start on time. Private photography inside isn't allowed. Bags and rucksacks can't be taken in. Honestly, the outside and the setting are the main event, and the interior is a quick blur of painted legends.

Walk back down toward the village and you will pass the yellow neo-Gothic Hohenschwangau Castle. Ludwig II grew up in this summer residence, which his father had rebuilt from a ruin in 1833-37. A separate tour of about 45 minutes is available, but you can also just walk around the castle garden, which is free.

From there it's a short stroll to the Alpsee, a clear mountain lake with paths along the shore and rowing boats to hire in season. It's much quieter than the hill above and a good place to take a break.

Take the bus back to Füssen, where the train station is, and stay for dinner before the train home. The old town is a short walk from the station, pedestrian and compact, dominated by the High Castle, the former summer residence of the prince-bishops of Augsburg, and the baroque St. Mang's Abbey, whose roots go back to the 9th century.

This is the Allgäu, so the menu is more Alpine than in Munich: Käsespätzle, the egg noodles baked with cheese and fried onions, and Kaiserschmarrn, a shredded pancake big enough to share.

Nymphenburg was the summer residence of the Wittelsbachs. Elector Ferdinand Maria and his wife Henriette Adelaide began it in 1664 after the birth of their son Max Emanuel, and later rulers kept adding to it for generations. Part of it is still the home and office of the head of the Wittelsbach family.

Inside, the state rooms center on the Stone Hall, a festival hall three floors high with frescoes by Johann Baptist Zimmermann. The most visited room is the Gallery of Beauties, where Ludwig I hung 36 portraits of beautiful women from every class of Munich society, painted by Joseph Karl Stieler. They include a shoemaker's daughter and Lola Montez, Ludwig's controversial mistress. Nearby is the bedroom where the future Ludwig II was born in 1845.

Behind the palace the park opens out into canals, lawns, wooded paths and a handful of small pavilions. The Elector opened it to the public in 1792, and the main gate is open from 6am to 8pm in April and October. The Amalienburg, a rococo hunting lodge built in 1734-39 by François de Cuvilliés for Electress Maria Amalia, is the best of them, with a hall of mirrors and even a kennel room for the hunting dogs. From 16 October it is shut with the other park palaces, so the walk itself is the show.

The Marstallmuseum in the south wing has the court carriages and sleighs, including the fantasy ones of Ludwig II, and it is the indoor alternative once the pavilions close.

The Schlosswirtschaft Schwaige is in a side wing of the palace, and it's the easy choice for lunch: Bavarian cooking on a slightly higher level than a beer hall, in a baroque room, open daily from 11am, with the kitchen running from 11:30am to 9:45pm. Order a classic such as Schweinsbraten or Schnitzel, or a Kaiserschmarrn if you skipped it on the castle day.

If the weather is good and you want a proper beer garden, the Königlicher Hirschgarten is a 15-20 minute walk from the palace. It has been serving since 1791, has about 7,000 self-service seats in the garden, and keeps a deer enclosure.

The Deutsches Museum is the largest science and technology museum in the world. It was founded in 1903 on the initiative of Oskar von Miller and sits on an island in the Isar. It is also in the middle of a major renovation: about half the building is open with new exhibitions and the other half is a construction site until around 2028, so some old classics are not on view.

What is open is still more than a day's worth. Don't try to see everything. Pick two or three out of the roughly 20 exhibitions, for example space, historic aviation or the robotics show, and check the day's schedule at the entrance for free demonstrations. Many of the displays are hands-on.

Munich's river is a surprise. The Isar flows for about 14 kilometers through the city, and its banks are wide gravel beaches and meadows where half the city picnics and barbecues in summer. From the museum island, take the river path south toward the Reichenbachbrücke, under a kilometer away, where people sit on the bridge and the banks in the evening.

In October there are no swimmers, but there are joggers, dog walkers and people with a drink on the steps. If you do come in summer, swim only in the designated areas and never near the weirs: the current is stronger than it looks.

For the last night, go to the Au, a small district right on the Isar. The Wirtshaus in der Au, on Lilienstraße, has served beer and dumplings since 1901. The menu is traditional Bavarian with modern touches, and the Knödel are the reason to come: Semmelknödel (bread dumplings) in a mushroom sauce make a full vegetarian main, and the Leberknödelsuppe is the lighter start. Skip the roast pork tonight; you've had it twice.

Book a table, since it fills up. Afterward, the Glockenbachviertel around Gärtnerplatz and Haidhausen on the east bank are where Munich goes out in the evening, with bars and small clubs.