Munich: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Ludwig I came to the throne in 1825 wanting Munich to look like Athens, and he spent twenty years and a great deal of state money making it so. He hired one architect, Leo von Klenze, and had him lay out whole streets and squares at once — a Greek square here, an Italian loggia there, a Florentine palace for the post office. It is why Munich feels designed rather than grown. Two hours, flat, and all of it in the centre.
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A short history of Munich
In 1158 Duke Henry the Lion built a bridge and a toll station on the River Isar, and the place, named after monks who lived there, grew into a city. From 1180 until 1918 the House of Wittelsbach ruled it and Bavaria. In 1810 the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig was celebrated here, and the Oktoberfest grew out of that celebration. In 1923 Hitler tried to seize power from a beer hall in the city, and Munich became the Nazi "Capital of the Movement". At the 1972 Olympics Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 athletes and coaches from the Israeli team. Today it is an industrial centre and home to the headquarters of BMW and Siemens.
The ten best sights in Munich
1Neues RathausFree. The clock plays at 11 and 12, and it takes 12 minutes
2FrauenkircheFree, and no building in the old town may rise above it
3AsamkircheFree. Two brothers built it for themselves, and it shows
4Peterskirche€5 for 306 steps, and the only view down on the square
5TheatinerkircheFree, yellow outside and entirely white inside
6Residenz€9, 130 rooms, and the Antiquarium is the one to see
7Alte Pinakothek€7, and €1 on Sundays. Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt
8Pinakothek der Moderne€10, and €1 on Sundays. Four museums in one building
9Lenbachhaus€10, and the Blue Rider room is the reason to come
10Museum Brandhorst€7, 36,000 coloured rods on the outside, and Twombly inside
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What is an audio walk?
Tours in Munich →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Munich:
Free walking tours in Munich
The city a king drew
Ludwig I came to the throne in 1825 wanting Munich to look like Athens, and he spent twenty years and a great deal of state money making it so. He hired one architect, Leo von Klenze, and had him lay out whole streets and squares at once — a Greek square here, an Italian loggia there, a Florentine palace for the post office. It is why Munich feels designed rather than grown. Two hours, flat, and all of it in the centre.
- Marienplatz · The square has been the middle of Munich since 1158, when a duke burned down the bishop’s bridge upstream so that the salt road would have to cross here instead, and charged a toll. The town grew on that single act of sabotage.
- Frauenkirche · Two brick towers with onion domes, finished in 1525 because the money ran out before the spires could be built — and the stopgap became the symbol of the city. A 2004 referendum forbids any new building in the centre from rising above them.
- Asamkirche · Two brothers, a sculptor and a painter, built this church on their own land with their own money in 1746 as a private chapel, and only opened it to the public under pressure. It is eight metres wide and there is not a flat surface in it.
- Viktualienmarkt · Moved here by royal decree in 1807 when Marienplatz grew too small, and it never stopped. The maypole in the middle is replaced every few years and the guild emblems on it say what the market sells; stealing another village’s maypole is a real custom with a real ransom in beer.
- Residenz · The Wittelsbach family ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918 — seven hundred and thirty-eight years, one of the longest runs of any dynasty in Europe — and this was their town house. Eighty per cent of it was rubble in 1945 and what you walk through was rebuilt from photographs.
- Odeonsplatz · Klenze copied the loggia here from Florence, and in November 1923 Hitler’s march on the city was stopped at it by police gunfire. The Nazis later made the spot a shrine and posted guards; Müncheners who refused to salute took the alley behind it, which the city still calls the Shirkers’ Lane.
A park, a river and a wave
Munich sits an hour from the Alps on a gravel plain, and it treats the river running through it as a beach. The Isar was straightened into a concrete channel in the nineteenth century; between 2000 and 2011 the city tore the concrete out and let it braid again, and now people swim in it in the middle of town. The park it feeds is bigger than Central Park, was opened to commoners in 1789 as a deliberate political act, and has a river wave in it that people surf all year. Two and a half hours, flat, and bring a towel.
- Eisbach wave · A standing wave about a metre high where a channel drops under a bridge, surfed since the early 1970s and illegal until the city gave in and legalised it in 2010. It runs at the same height every day of the year, including in snow, and the queue is strictly one at a time.
- Monopteros · A Greek temple on an artificial hill built in 1836 out of the rubble of the city walls. The hill exists only to give a view, and in the summer the slope below it is where the city sits in the evening with whatever it brought.
- Chinesischer Turm · A wooden pagoda from 1790 with a beer garden for seven thousand around it. Bavarian law lets you bring your own food into a beer garden — the right was won in a court case and a protest in 1995 — but the beer must be bought there.
- Kleinhesseloher See · A lake dug in 1803 with three islands in it, and rowing boats on it from April. The park around it was laid out by an American-born officer who argued to the Elector that a park open to everyone would do more for public order than another barracks.
- Flaucher · Gravel islands in the middle of the Isar, reached by wading, where Munich barbecues all summer. They exist because the city spent eleven years and thirty-five million euros taking the concrete lining out of its own river.
- Müllersches Volksbad · Paid for privately in 1901 by an engineer who left the city a fortune on condition it build a bathhouse for working people, and it was the largest and most expensive swimming hall in the world when it opened. Five euros fifty, and it still works.
Where it started, and what it cost
The Nazi party was founded in Munich, held its first meetings in its beer halls, tried to seize the country from here in 1923, and called the city the Capital of the Movement. Munich spent fifty years not talking about it and then, in 2015, built a documentation centre on the exact site of the party headquarters — white, windowless, and deliberately without a single artefact. This walk is that history where it happened. Two hours, and it is not a cheerful one.
- NS-Dokumentationszentrum · It stands on the footprint of the Brown House, the party headquarters, which Munich left as an empty car park for seventy years because nobody could agree what to put there. The building holds no objects at all — only documents and photographs — so that nothing in it can become a relic.
- Königsplatz · Klenze built this as a Greek square with grass between the temples; the Nazis paved all of it in twenty thousand granite slabs for rallies. The city tore the slabs up in 1988 and put the grass back, which is itself an argument about what to do with such a place.
- Glyptothek · The oldest public museum in Munich, from 1830, built to hold Greek sculpture a king bought by the shipload. It burned out in the war and was rebuilt bare — no frescoes, no colour, raw brick — and the sculptures look better in it than they did before.
- Lenbachhaus · Holds the world’s largest collection of the Blue Rider group — Kandinsky, Münter, Marc — who were working in Munich when it was the most adventurous art city in Europe. Gabriele Münter hid the paintings in her cellar through the entire Nazi period and gave them to the city in 1957.
- Olympiapark · Built on a hill of war rubble for the 1972 games, which Germany meant as the opposite of 1936: pastel colours, no uniforms, a transparent tent roof instead of stone. Eleven Israeli athletes and a German policeman were murdered here on the fifth of September, and the memorial stands by the broadcast centre.
- Theresienwiese · An empty field for fifty weeks of the year. The first Oktoberfest was a horse race held here in 1810 for a royal wedding and the crowd liked it enough to repeat it; today six million people come, drink about seven million litres, and the tents are built and taken down each year.
Getting to Munich and getting around
- Munich Airport · The S-Bahn is 45 minutes and €13, and runs from 4am
- Hauptbahnhof · Every S-Bahn line passes through here. Ten minutes to Marienplatz
- ZOB · Flixbus to Prague, Vienna and the Alps
- Marienplatz · Where the U-Bahn and S-Bahn cross under the old town
Cheap eats in Munich
Eight counters where Munich eats standing. Weisswurst is the local test: a white veal sausage eaten before noon, never after, and you suck it out of the skin rather than cut it. The beer gardens are the other half — Bavarian law lets you carry your own food in, so a bench, a pretzel from home and one bought beer is a legitimate lunch.
- Viktualienmarkt · Closed Sundays, and the beer garden shuts at ten
- Weisses Brauhaus · Two sausages, a pretzel and a wheat beer, about €12
- Augustiner-Keller · A litre is about €10, and you may bring your own food
- Chinesischer Turm · 7,000 seats in the park, and a brass band on Sundays
- Hofbräuhaus · Owned by the state of Bavaria, and knowingly full of tourists
- Schrannenhalle · Food counters under a rebuilt 1853 iron hall, open late
- Dallmayr · Supplied the royal court, and the coffee bar is downstairs
- Elisabethmarkt · The Schwabing market, and half the price of the famous one
Museums in Munich
Almost every state museum in Munich costs one euro on a Sunday — the Pinakotheken, the Glyptothek, the Brandhorst. It is a standing rule, not an offer, and it is the single best thing to know about the city.
- Alte Pinakothek · €7, and €1 on Sundays. Closed Mondays
- Deutsches Museum · €15, open 9 to 5 every day including Monday
- Lenbachhaus · €10, and the Kandinsky room is upstairs
- Pinakothek der Moderne · €10, €1 on Sundays, and the design basement is the best floor
- Museum Brandhorst · €7, 36,000 coloured ceramic rods outside, Twombly inside
- Glyptothek · €6, and the bare rebuilt rooms suit the sculpture
- BMW Museum · €10, and the showroom across the bridge is free
- NS-Dokumentationszentrum · Free, on the site of the party headquarters, and no objects
Nature and day trips near Munich
- Englischer Garten · Free, open all night, and the beer gardens shut at ten
- Isar river · Free, and the current is stronger than it looks
- Nymphenburg · €8 for the palace, and the 180-hectare park is free
- Olympiapark · Free, and the tower is €13
- Flaucher · Gravel islands you wade to, and the city barbecues on them
- Westpark · Free, a Japanese garden in it, and an open-air cinema in summer
- Starnberger See · 25 minutes by S-Bahn, and a mad king drowned in it in 1886
- Kloster Andechs · A monastery on a hill that brews its own, an hour out
Things to do in Munich with kids
- Deutsches Museum · €15, a coal mine indoors, and the lightning show hourly
- Hellabrunn Zoo · €20, children €8, and allow three hours
- Olympiaturm · €13, 190 metres up in 30 seconds, and the Alps on a clear day
- Eisbach wave · Free to watch, and children can stand on the bridge
- BMW Welt · Free, and you may sit in the cars
- Botanischer Garten · €6, glasshouses with a butterfly room in spring
Live music in Munich
- Nationaltheater · From €15 standing, and sold out months ahead
- Gasteig · The Philharmonic’s hall, and students pay €10
- Muffatwerk · A 1900 power station on the river, and a beer garden outside
- Backstage · Four stages, loud, and the cheapest door in the city
- Kammerspiele · The theatre that takes the risks, and an art nouveau room
- Blitz · In the old aquarium building, and the sound system is the point
Nightlife in Munich
- Glockenbachviertel · Bars from six, and nothing starts before eleven
- Gärtnerplatz · A round square with a theatre on it, and people sit on the steps
- Schwabing · The old bohemian quarter, now expensive and still good
- Harry Klein · Techno with live visuals, and open until six
- Hofbräukeller · The local one, in Haidhausen, and not the tourist hall
- Augustiner-Keller · 5,000 seats under chestnut trees, and it stays open to ten
Frequently asked questions about Munich
What is there to see in Munich?
The top sights in Munich are Neues Rathaus, Frauenkirche and Asamkirche. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Munich?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Munich without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Munich?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Munich, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The city a king drew.
How do you get to Munich and get around?
The main ways are Munich Airport, Hauptbahnhof and ZOB. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Munich, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Munich that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Munich for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.