Bavaria’s capital is a cocktail of beloved sights, opulent Baroque churches, and museums of the highest order. Munich’s Kunstareal is a cluster of art museums with such a lot of masterpieces. It’s difficult to grasp where to start. A week would never be enough to check all of them. And to do different things in Munich and see those valuable collections that were assembled by the Wittelsbach monarchs. Who dominated Bavaria up to the twentieth century.

Their palaces within the town are two of the many glorious monuments to take in. And you’ll catch sight of Alps from the highest of the Rathaus and St Peter’s Church. Munich is also the town of some world-famous German exports like BMW, FC Bayern and also the all-time Oktoberfest. More than two weeks of beer-fuelled merrymaking every autumn.

Let’s explore the best things to do in Munich:

#1 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Alte Pinakothek

Dating to 1836, the Alte Pinakothek is one of the world’s oldest art galleries. The museum’s Neo-Renaissance style would be a model for galleries that up in Brussels. Rome and St Petersburg Campaign.

It was all ordered by King Ludwig I to deal with the Wittelsbach dynasty’s exceptional collection. Started by Duke Wilhelm IV back within the 1500s.

The upshot is 800 German, French, Dutch, Flemish, Italian and Spanish paintings from the 1200s to the 1800s. Of superlative quality. The masters WHO take the spotlight are Peter Paul Rubens, Albrecht Dürer and Vandyke. All represented by multiple paintings.

And on your means, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Hans Baldung Grien. Hieronymous Bosch and Rembrandt are simply a couple of of the various prestigious names you’ll encounter.

#2 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Munich Residenz

What began as a 14th-century castle for the Wittelsbach monarchs on the northern fringe of the town burgeoned over the course of many hundred years. Into an elegant palace complicated of 10 courtyards and a hundred thirty rooms. Successive dukes, emperors, princes, and kings all created grand statements within the Renaissance. Baroque, Rococo, and neoclassic designs.

Given the dimensions of the palace and also the richness of its art. The Munich Residenz could be a sight to do in many visits if you can. But many musts to tick off are the Italian renaissance grottos courtyard. The lavishly adorned the Antiquarium banquet hall and the gilded moldings within the Baroque Ancestral Gallery.

#3 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Neues Rathaus

A postal card favorite, Munich’s town hall on Marienplatz is a Gothic Revival surprise. A monument is worthy of the city. The facade is festooned with pinnacles. Niches with very little trefoil arches and statues of the primary four bavarian kings on the bay of the tower.

Munich’s population doubled in less than twenty years between 1880 and 1900. And also the Neues Rathaus, which was originally completed in 1874.Had to be enlarged barely 20 years when it was finished.

That facade is one hundred meters long and also the building was extended to four hundred rooms. And you’ll be able to go in to scale the 85-meter where you can see to the alps on cloudless days.

Since 1908 the glockenspiel has chimed day after day at 11:00 and 12:00. And then17:00 (from March to October. With automatons acting out episodes from the 1600s.

#4 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Englischer Garten

Scanning a map of the town, you’ll be smitten by the scale of the Englischer Garten. Created in the eighteenth century. The park begins on the locality of the Isar within the north behind the Residenz and simply looks to go on and on.

At 370 hectares this expanse of lawns, tree groves, pasture, waterways, and a lake is one in every of the world’s largest urban parks, larger than New York’s Central Park.

There are some neat very little sights to take in, sort of a Japanese eating place added for the Olympic Games in 1972 and therefore the Chinese Tower supported new Gardens’ temple and initial erected in 1790. however one thing you will not have expected to return across is surfing: yes, the man-made Eisbach watercourse features a robust current, forming a static wave that old boarders ride for up to a second at a time.

#5 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Neue Pinakothek

King Ludwig, I also had an eye for the contemporary art of the nineteenth century and amassed from the period. Some four hundred paintings from the 1800s are on show in the Neue Pinakothek, and that they verify all of the important movements from the century.

There are German Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, French Realists like Delacroix and Courbet, and Impressionist Art by degas, Cézanne, Monet, Gauguin, and Renoir. After that, you’ll go slow and study every movement in detail, or scoot across periods to the other masterpieces by Goya, Rodin, Klimt, Munch, and Turner.

#6 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Marienplatz

In any season, Marienplatz ahead of the Neues Rathaus will be full of locals and tourists out shopping, sightseeing or simply watching the town go by. The square has been at the center of town since the twelfth century and is called for a Marian column that was raised here within the seventeenth century.

The monument is from 1638 and celebrates the withdrawal of Swedish troops from the metropolis throughout the Thirty Years’ War. The golden sculpture at the top is older, carven in 1590 and showing mary on a crescent moon as the Queen of Heaven.

This was the primary Marian column north of the alps, and also the forerunner for a bunch of comparable monuments in Bavaria and Central Europe.

Come in December, once the Christmas market is in full swing.

#7 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit St Peter’s Church

Munich’s oldest church was 1st built at the tip of the 1100s however destroyed by fire in 1347. The reconstruction was within the Gothic vogue and down the years there are several extensions. Leaving the St Peter’s with Renaissance and Baroque elements.

That fusion of designs applies to the art. As 15th-century Gothic paintings by Janpolack sit below a marvelous Late Baroque ceiling fresco. By Johann Baptist Zimmermann.

Go in for a better look at the high altar. Which includes a figure of St Peter graven by Desiderius Erasmus Grasser at the flip of the sixteenth century.

St Peter’s church rests atop the hammock. Petersburg and it’s worth braving the tower’s 299 steps to pay a number of minutes citing Munich’s landmarks.With the assistance of a telescope.

#8 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Deutsches Museum

Like the Alte Pinakothek, the Deutsches museum could simply keep you occupied for a complete day. The museum sits on an island within the Isar. (the Museumsinsel) And maps the development of Science and Technology in a European country.

What will keep you engrossed is that the sheer sort of fields dealt with in these galleries. From engineering science to the reproduction, part, and astronomy to hydraulic engineering.

If you merely have one or two handfuls some of the hours to spare. You’ll arrange ahead and concentrate on one or two things. Every field has well-presented and totally interactive exhibits, inviting youngsters to push buttons, crank wheels and pull levers.

And whereas younger minds are catered for and there’s even a fun kids’ zone. The museum never shies away from the sophisticated details.

#9 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Pinakothek der Moderne

Although it’s known domestically as the “Dritte” (third) when the Alte and Neue Pinakothek. Munich’s modern art museum is just as essential. As with its neighbors within the Kunstreal. The galleries are comprehensive and furnished art by the most celebrated names of the last a hundred years.

The best bit is the expressionism exhibition from each of the Brücke and Blaue Reiterteams. And artists like Kirchner, Kandinsky, Klee, Franz Marc, and Emil Nolde are familiar to all.

In the rest of the Modernism galleries, you’ll bump into Francis bacon, Braque, Otto Dix, Picasso, Magritte, Max Ernst, and Joan Miro. And then bringing you from the Sixties to this day are the modern galleries abounding with art by Sigmar Polke. Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Lucio Fontana among others.

And beyond all this, there are exhibitions for applied art/industrial style, photography, drawings and design.

#10 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Lenbachhaus

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Munich had a spirited and influential art scene, once the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group shook up the old academies. Many leading Expressionists were members, including Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter and August Macke, and the Lenbachaus brims with their paintings.

There’s also a great deal of up to date art by the likes of Gerhard Richter, andy Warhol, and Jenny Holzer. The museum’s roll-call of Munich-based artists goes back to the Gothic painter Janpolack and including the portrait painter Georg Desmarées, the landscape artists Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann and the Biedermeier luminary Carl Spitzweg.

The Lenbachhaus is named for the portrait painter Franz von Lenbach who commissioned the building within the1880s. In 2013 a new wing was added, clad with copper and aluminum tubes.

#11 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Asam Church

An easy walk from the Sendlinger Tor at the southern tip of old Munich is an extravagant Late Baroque church wedged in a confined space between neighboring buildings. The Asam Church is named after its mid-18th-century designers, the brothers Asam, one a painter and the other a sculptor.

An interesting thing about the church is that it was a private chapel, unattached to any faith. This, along with the narrow space, gave the brothers freedom to break a few baroque rules for layout and interior decoration.

The church faces west for instance, and the crucifix opposite the pulpit is hung usually low. These quirks and the skill of the radiant ceiling frescos and workmanship within the stuccowork lining the nave add up to one of the foremost buildings within theGerman Late Baroque style.

#12 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Frauenkirche

Although there are prettier churches in Munich, none possess the 15th-century Frauenkirche’s sense of scale. Its pair of towers, topped with onion domes are a Munich landmark, and no new building is permitted to exceed their 109-meter height.

The church’s style is splendidly discreet, with few window openings and unadorned walls that inspire awe. The Frauenkirche suffered within the war, however, there’s still loads of rehabilitated or original art to hunt out within.

The choir stalls from the beginning of the sixteenth century are carved with busts of prophets and apostles, and a few of the glass windows are from the medieval church that stood on the location before this one.

There’s conjointly a grave monument to King of France the 14th-century Holy Emperor of Rome, and see a shoe-shaped impression at the doorway, supposedly left by the devil!

#13 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Theatine Church

At Odeonplatz you’ll be greeted by the luxurious yellow facade of the 17th-century Theatine Church. This monument was designed by Italian architects within the Baroque vogue and took cues from Rome’s Sant’Andrea Della Valle.

Give yourself time to marvel at the painted facade. Wealthy with niches, reliefs, Doric columns, and Ionic pilasters. It’s all the merchandise of a holy vow given by Henriette Adelaide of savoy. If she might provide birth to a prince for the Elector Ferdinand Maria.

Through the doors, keep an eye fixed out for the altar with pictures of the evangelists from 1722. The black picket pulpit dating to 1688 and also the crypt. Resting place of many members of the Wittelsbach family.

#14 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Bavarian National Museum

Inaugurated by King Maximilian II in 1855, the bavarian museum is another cultural attraction that wants plenty of your time.

In-store here are over forty rooms of ornamental things, dating from antiquity to art movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. There’s faience, weapons, armor, porcelain, oil paintings, musical instruments, furniture, clocks, costumes ware and a whole lot more besides.

The high points are the Bollert collection, a treasure lately Gothic and Renaissance and sculpture from nonsecular buildings around Bavaria, and therefore the set of Rococo Nymphenburg ceramic ware figures by a people modeled Franz Anton Buselli.

The Historicist museum building also deserves a mention because it was purpose-made to complement the collections at the tip of the Nineties.

#15 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit BMW Museum

Karl Schwanzer, the man who designed the famous BMW Headquarters also drew up the plans for the futuristic museum building ahead. Usually described as the“salad bowl”. The building was completed in 1973 and its galleries are on a Guggenheim-esque spiral.

In Addition, the showrooms are air, spacious and effortlessly cool, as you go on a journey through the brand’s technological development. There are vintage cars, aircraft, motorcycles, turbines, engines moreover as outlandish thought vehicles from the last two decades. All accompanied by information via multimedia.

Did you know Elvis Presley owned a BMW?. Well, he did and it’s on show here.

#16 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit BMW Welt

After learning about BMW’s past you can be brought up to date. With the present at the stylish exhibition hall next door. BMW Welt is liberated to enter. And, therefore, the best explanation is that it’s the world’s most spectacular car-franchise saleroom.

People return to select up their new BMWs. Which may be a spectacle in its claim as their car is lifted up to them by elevator into a glass hall. However, you can take a closer look at all of the BMW models currently on the market. Get behind the wheel and even book a test drive.

If one steals your heart you can order it here for delivery to most parts of the world. Therefore, you can buy BMW souvenirs and accessories at the look.

#17 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Glyptothek

Our final museum in the Kunstareal would be a priority in almost any other town. Which testifies to the volume of art and history in this quarter.

The Glyptothek is a neoclassical temple ordered by King Ludwig I as a repository for his Greek. And Roman sculpture collection. The building was completed in 1830. Creating it the oldest museum in the city.

There’s quite one,000 years of sculpture inside, spanning the Archaic. Classical and Hellenistic Periods moreover because of the empire.

The Hellenistic Barnerini faun is one to appear out for. Depicting a life-sized faun and carved around the flip of the 2nd Century bc. From Roman times there’s an assortment of busts of emperors like Emperor Augustus, Nero. Caligula and Traian, and the statesmen Sulla and Gaius Marius.

#18 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Olympiapark

While many former Olympic venues around the world tend to be forgotten. Munich’s 1972 Olympic Park is still a popular day out.

The park is a huge activity center wherever you can ride a zip-line over the iconic stadium. Take part in watersports on the lake and ski on the hill in winter.

There are also fairground amusements in summer and no lack of places to grab a snack or meal.

The park has also witnessed some historic events, one grim. Likewise, the Munich massacre of 11 Israeli team members in 1972. And you can still visit Building thirty-one where the Israeli team was staying.

On a lighter note, the Olympic stadium was additionally the scene of 1 of the foremostunforgettableWorld Cup finals in 1974. Once Beckenbauer’s Germany came from behind to defeat Johan Cruyff’s Netherlands 2-1.

#19 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Allianz Arena

Even if you merely have a passing interest in football. A visit to the home of FC Bayern should be on the agenda.

That’s not simply because they’re Germany’s top team and have a special place within the nation’s culture. However, they additionally touched into an awing new home simply over a decade ago.

The 66,000-seater arena is clad with 2,874 luminous panels. That illuminates with the club’s colors on match-days. The Allianz Arena’s hour-long tour is an all-access experience. Guiding you into the dressing rooms, player’s tunnel. A mixed zone where post-match interviews are given and the press conference area.

After that, you can spend some time in the museum acquainting yourself with Bayern’s greatest players like Franz Beckenbauer. Gerd Müller, and Lothar Matthäus, and reliving the club’s five Champions League/.European Cup victories.

#20 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Munich National Theatre

The neoclassical National Theatre on Max-Joseph-Platz is one of Europe’s high opera homes. And, therefore, the home venue of the Bavarian State Ballet, BavarianState Orchestra and therefore the Bavaria State Opera.

The current style and its majestic porch are from 1825. And though the building was devastated in the war it had been rebuilt to the designer Karl von Fischer’s 19th-century plans within the sixties.

Opera fans who aren’t able to get tickets could still arrange a german language tour to ascertain the stunning multi-story backstage area. And find out more about the people who have graced this building: a variety of Richard Wagner’s operas debuted at the National Theatre. Like Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Das Rheingold, and Die Walküre.

#21 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Müller’sches Volksbad

If a swimming pool sounds a bit anticlimactic. The Müller’sches Volksbad on the right bank of the Isar is anything but a disappointment. Especially if you have a taste for art nouveau style.

The pool is additionally the closest thing to a secret. In-the-know experience on our list.

There’s no equivalent in Germany. And every step of the banal activity of going for a swim and sauna session is made exciting by Carl Hochede’s Classical motifs. Patterned stucco flourishes on the ceilings. Whimsical lamp holders and wrought iron banisters.

#22 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Hofbräuhaus

If you’re up for a beer, a carefree atmosphere and helping of traditionalBavarianfare a beer hall or Wirtshaus would be just the ticket. There are dozens to choose from around the city. And with a bit of research, you’ll realize an authentic one close to you.

And even though you won’t find many locals within the Hofbräuhaus. It’s still one in all those things you need to do in the city. It’s an annex of the Staatliches Hofbräuhaus brewery. Which was set here from 1589 till 1897 once it relocated to the suburbs.

One of the many eminent regulars at the hall was Mozart, who lived simply round the corner in the eighteenth century. On the wall, you’ll notice brew steins belonging to regulars. That is kept under lock and key.

#23 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Viktualienmarkt

The city’s food market was settled here in 1807 once it grew too huge for Marienplatz.

First and foremost is Viktualienmarkt is somewhere for individuals to try and do their grocery shopping. Made from140 indoor and outdoor stalls and outlets selling fresh fruit. And vegetables, sausage, cheese and fancier specialty foods like olive oil, wine, and tea.

But that’only the story, as there’s a big Biergarten in the centre of the marketplace, and one of Munich’s favorites. If you’re peckish there’s a tantalizing choice of food stalls. Or you might pick up a dish or wurst from the biergarten’s own self-service restaurant.

#24 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Hellabrunn Zoo

In forty hectares on the meadow-covered right bank of the Isar in the south of town, Hellabrunn zoo rarely ranks outside the top5 in Europe.

Established in 1911, it had been one in all the first in the world to adopt moats and ditches as barriers rather than cages, however additionally introduced the thought of the Geo-Zoo, where animals are located according to their countries.

If you’re involved in the zoo’s humane credentials, it takes half in breeding programs for endangered species like silvery and drill baboons, in addition to elephants, Arctic foxes, and gorillas.

Alpacas, polar bears, South American sea lions, and giraffes are some of the 760-odd species. And little ones will come and feed pygmy goats and Damara goats at two separate petting zoos.

#25 of 25 Best Things to Do in Munich: Visit Oktoberfest

Some of the figures related to the world’s biggest beer festival are mind-blowing. We’re talking seven million guests and more thanseven.5 million liters of beer consumed.

The 16-18-day festival begins on the third Saturday of September and goes back to 1810, once prince Ludwig married Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen.

In 1896 the city’s breweries engineered large brew tents for the celebration, and since then beer-drinking has been the main activity! There are fourteen tents for a good set up at Theresienwiese in the west of the city, holding up to 8,500 travelers every.

Despite the capacity these tents fill up fast, thus get there early within the day if you wish a seat. Also, have a ball at the amusements and funfair rides, and be sure to soak up that alcohol with pretzels, bratwurst, and schnitzel.

Whether you’re visiting for a long weekend or aiming to make the city your new home, there’s plenty to visualize and do in Germany’s third-biggest town. This Greentown is understood for its lovely parks, several museums, and delightful palaces. to create the most of your trip, we have a place along with a list of attractions that we mentioned above. You can’t leave the city without seeing these sights from the best museums to stunning town views.

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