Munich in 3 days, on foot

This 3-day self-guided walking plan for Munich covers 26 narrated sights in an easy day-by-day order. Each day is split into a morning and an afternoon loop, and every stop has a two to three minute audio story in the Gingerguide app.

You set the pace: this is a suggested order, not a schedule. Walk it in 3 days, or stretch it out. Reorder freely; Munich rewards a detour.

Day 1

Morning

1. Marienplatz: Munich's beating heart for nearly nine centuries: a former grain market crowned by a golden column raised in 1638, when the city gave thanks for surviving a war.
2. New Town Hall: The soaring neo-Gothic town hall whose tower stages Munich's beloved Glockenspiel: 32 figures that re-enact a 1568 wedding and a plague-ending dance twice a day, before a golden rooster crows.
3. Frauenkirche: Munich's twin-towered symbol, capped with two rounded green domes when the money for Gothic spires ran out in 1525, and so beloved that the city voted to keep its whole skyline below them.
4. Old Town Hall: A fairy-tale white Gothic hall at the east end of Marienplatz, now home to a toy museum, and once the room where a 1938 speech helped ignite Kristallnacht.
5. St. Peter's Church: Munich's oldest parish church, on the hill where the city began, climb its 306-step tower for the finest view in town, and meet the jewelled skeleton saint inside.

Afternoon

1. Viktualienmarkt: Munich's open-air larder since 1807, when a king pushed the food stalls off Marienplatz, a hundred-plus vendors, a rotating beer garden, and fountains honouring the city's favourite clowns.
2. Asamkirche: An eighteenth-century explosion of gold and stucco squeezed onto a plot eight metres wide, the private church two Baroque master-brothers built beside their own house, to please nobody but themselves.
3. St. Michael's Church: The great white Jesuit church built to win Bavaria back for Rome, a vast unsupported vault above, and below, the flower-strewn tomb of Ludwig II, the fairy-tale king.
4. Hofbräuhaus: The world's most famous beer hall, founded in 1589 as a duke's private brewery and opened to the public in 1828, a thousand people, one vaulted room, and beer by the litre.

Day 2

Morning

1. Munich Residence: Five centuries of Wittelsbach power stacked into one palace: a 66-metre Renaissance hall of painted ceilings and more than 130 rooms, rebuilt stitch by stitch from the rubble of 1944.
2. Cuvilliés Theatre: A jewel-box of gilded Rococo boxes where Mozart premiered Idomeneo in 1781, its carved interior unbolted and hidden in the war, then rebuilt, original but on a new spot.
3. Theatine Church: A piece of Baroque Rome dropped over the Odeonsplatz, the butter-yellow court church an Italian princess vowed to build for the birth of her son, and the crypt of Bavaria's kings.
4. Feldherrnhalle: An Italian-style stone loggia King Ludwig I built to honour Bavaria's generals, later the scene of Hitler's failed 1923 putsch, and of a quiet back-alley refusal marked in bronze today.
5. National Theatre: The temple-fronted home of the Bavarian State Opera, twice burned and twice rebuilt, the stage where Wagner's Tristan and the first two Ring operas were heard for the very first time.

Afternoon

1. Maximilianstraße: The boulevard a king invented as a work of art in the 1850s, in a brand-new style named after himself, now lined with the priciest luxury boutiques in Germany, ending at parliament.
2. Hofgarten: The Bavarian rulers' formal court garden behind the Residenz, its central pavilion crowned not by Diana, as everyone assumes, but by a bronze Bavaria holding out the land's grain and salt.
3. Alte Pinakothek: One of the world's great old-master galleries, built by Ludwig I in 1836, home to more Rubens than anywhere, and a bomb-scar mended in honest brick that refuses to hide the war.
4. Königsplatz: A neoclassical square staged twice: King Ludwig I's serene 'Athens on the Isar,' later paved by the Nazis into a rally ground, then given back its grass, its dark chapter deliberately not erased.

Day 3

Morning

1. Glyptothek: King Ludwig I's temple of ancient sculpture on Königsplatz, home to the Greek warriors of Aegina, first 'restored' with new limbs in Rome, then stripped back to their honest ruins.
2. NS-Dokumentationszentrum: Munich's documentation centre on the history of National Socialism, a stark white cube built on the site of the Nazi party's former headquarters, a place of learning and remembrance, not a sight.
3. English Garden: One of the world's largest city parks, opened to everyone in 1789 on the idea of an American-born count, miles of meadow along the Isar, a pagoda beer garden, and river surfers.
4. Eisbach Wave: In the middle of a landlocked city, a man-made arm of the Isar throws up a permanent standing wave, where Munich's experienced river surfers have ridden, one after another, since the 1970s.

Afternoon

1. Deutsches Museum: One of the world's largest science and technology museums, on an island in the Isar, a hands-on cathedral of machines, from a walk-through coal mine to indoor lightning, opened by its founder on his 70th birthday.
2. Nymphenburg Palace: The Bavarian kings' vast baroque summer palace, begun in 1664 to celebrate the birth of an heir, a gallery of 36 beauties, the birthplace of Ludwig II, and a park of hidden pleasure-houses.
3. Olympiapark: The green Olympic park of the 'cheerful' 1972 Games, under a famous floating tent roof and a 291-metre tower, a place of soaring optimism, and of remembrance for the massacre that broke it.
4. Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial: The memorial on the site of the first Nazi concentration camp, opened in 1933, a place of documentation and remembrance, kept so that what happened here would never be forgotten.

Full Munich guide and all stops → · Other itineraries: 2 days