Munich

Marienplatz is the centre of the old town, and almost every walk through it crosses the square. The neo-Gothic New Town Hall fills its north side with a long front of pinnacles, arcades and statues, and the Glockenspiel in its tower plays every day: two tiers of mechanical figures act out a tournament held for a ducal wedding in 1568 and the Schäfflertanz, the dance of the city's coopers. The late Gothic Old Town Hall closes the eastern end of the square, and the Mariensäule, a column crowned by a gilded figure of the Virgin, stands at its centre. From here the pedestrian streets lead west, and the street called the Tal runs east towards the river.

A few steps north-west of Marienplatz, the Frauenkirche, Munich's cathedral, rises in plain red brick to two towers capped with green copper domes, the silhouette that stands for the city. Inside, the late Gothic hall church is tall, white and spare, and a footprint set into the floor of the entrance hall is pointed out as the devil's: the story goes that he stamped on the one spot from which none of the windows can be seen. South of the church, Kaufingerstraße and Neuhauser Straße form the city's main shopping street, a pedestrian zone that ends in the west at the Karlstor, one of three surviving gates of the medieval walls. Like most shops in Germany, those along it close on Sundays.

Sendlinger Straße runs south-west from the edge of Marienplatz to the Sendlinger Tor, another of the old gates, and halfway along it, wedged into a row of town houses, stands the Asamkirche. The brothers Cosmas Damian and Egid Quirin Asam, a painter and a sculptor, built it in the 18th century beside their own house and filled its narrow nave from floor to ceiling with gilding, marbled stucco and frescoes. The church is small enough to see in a quarter of an hour and easy to walk past between the shop fronts.

Just south of Marienplatz, St Peter's, known in the city as the Alter Peter, has a tower of about 300 steps whose gallery looks straight across at the New Town Hall and the domes of the Frauenkirche, and on clear days to the Alps beyond the roofs. Below the church, the Viktualienmarkt has been the city's open-air food market since the early 19th century: permanent stalls of fruit and vegetables, cheese, meat, bread and spices, gathered around a tall maypole painted in Bavarian blue and white and hung with the emblems of the trades. Fountains among the stalls honour Munich's folk singers and comedians, Karl Valentin among them. It is a place for a standing lunch from the stalls, and like the shops it closes on Sundays.

A few minutes east of Marienplatz, on the small square called the Platzl, the Hofbräuhaus is the beer hall of what was once the royal court brewery, and the scene many visitors picture when they think of Munich. Under the painted vaults of the ground-floor hall, a brass band plays to long wooden tables shared by regulars and travellers; the regulars' tables carry their signs, and their own beer mugs are kept locked in racks along the walls. Beer comes by the Mass, a full litre, with the roast pork, sausages and pretzels of any Bavarian beer hall.

On the north-east edge of the old town, the Residenz was the city palace of Bavaria's rulers, a run of wings and courtyards built and rebuilt from the Renaissance to the 19th century. Its rooms lead from the Antiquarium, a long barrel-vaulted Renaissance hall lined with antique busts, through baroque, rococo and neoclassical apartments; the Treasury holds the crowns and jewels of the Bavarian royal house, and the Cuvilliés Theatre is a small rococo court theatre in red and gold. Behind the palace, the Hofgarten is a formal garden of gravel paths and clipped trees around a domed pavilion, the Dianatempel, with arcades along its edges.

Where the Residenz meets the Hofgarten, Odeonsplatz opens out at the northern edge of the old town. On its south side the Feldherrnhalle, an open loggia modelled on the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, closes the long view down Ludwigstraße; on its west side the ochre front of the Theatinerkirche rises to two towers and a high dome, a church in the Italian high baroque with a white stucco interior. From the square, Ludwigstraße runs straight north for more than a kilometre between the long, even façades King Ludwig I commissioned in the 19th century, past the university to the Siegestor, the triumphal arch where Schwabing begins.

West of Ludwigstraße, the Maxvorstadt quarter holds the Kunstareal, a district of museums, galleries and university buildings. The Alte Pinakothek shows European painting from the late Middle Ages to the 18th century, with Dürer, Rubens and Rembrandt among its painters; across the lawns, the Pinakothek der Moderne gathers modern art, design, architecture and drawing under one roof, and Museum Brandhorst, clad in a façade of coloured ceramic rods, shows art from the later 20th century on, with large groups of works by Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly. A few minutes to the south-west, Königsplatz is a broad square framed by the Propylaea gateway and two temple-fronted museum buildings. Beside it stand the Lenbachhaus, the ochre villa of the painter Franz von Lenbach, which holds the paintings of the Blue Rider circle, Kandinsky and Franz Marc among them, and the white cube of the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, the city's documentation centre on the National Socialist period.

North of the Siegestor, Schwabing was the quarter of painters and writers around 1900, when Kandinsky lived and worked here and Thomas Mann made his home in its streets; today it is a residential district of high-ceilinged apartment houses, its southern end full of students from the university next door. Leopoldstraße, the continuation of Ludwigstraße, is its main avenue, lined with poplars and pavement cafés as far as Münchner Freiheit, the square where much of the evening crowd gathers. West of it, the quieter streets around Elisabethplatz have a small food market of their own.

East of Schwabing, the Englischer Garten runs north from the edge of the old town along the Isar's west bank, about 3.7 square kilometres of meadows, woods and streams laid out as an English landscape park in the late 18th century. Near its southern end, the Monopteros, a small round temple on an artificial hill, looks back over the towers of the old town. Further north, the Chinese Tower, a five-storey wooden pagoda, rises from the middle of a large beer garden; north of the ring road that crosses it, the park grows quieter and more wooded. A bike is the easiest way to cover its length, and on some of the open meadows nude sunbathing is permitted.

The Isar flows past the east of the old town in a broad, shallow bed of pale gravel, cold from the Alps, and on warm days its banks fill with people. South of the centre, around the Flaucher, the river spreads into channels and gravel islands where locals sunbathe, wade and grill through the summer. Closer in, the Deutsches Museum, the museum of science and technology, stands on an island between two arms of the river; plan half a day at least. Further north on the east bank, the Maximilianeum, seat of the Bavarian parliament, closes the long axis of Maximilianstraße, and the gilded Angel of Peace stands on its column above the river at the end of Prinzregentenstraße.

South of the Viktualienmarkt, the Gärtnerplatz is a round square of flower beds with the Gärtnerplatz theatre on one side, and together with the Glockenbachviertel beside it, south-west of the old town, it is the city's quarter of small shops, bars and cafés and the centre of its LGBTQ+ scene. Across the river, behind the Maximilianeum, Haidhausen is a quieter district of late 19th-century apartment houses and small squares, with a small market on Wiener Platz.

About six kilometres north-west of the centre and reached by tram, Nymphenburg Palace was the summer residence of Bavaria's rulers, its long pale front spread out in pavilions at the head of a straight canal. The rooms open to visitors include the Stone Hall, a tall ballroom under ceiling frescoes, the Gallery of Beauties, the portraits of the women of his day that King Ludwig I commissioned, and the room in which Ludwig II was born. In the former stables, the Marstallmuseum shows state coaches and sleighs, the gilded ones of Ludwig II among them, with a collection of Nymphenburg porcelain on the floor above. Behind the palace, the park runs from a formal parterre into woods and canals, with small garden palaces among the trees, the rococo hunting lodge of the Amalienburg among them. Half a day covers the palace, the coaches and a walk in the park.

North-west of the centre, the Olympiapark was laid out for the Summer Games of 1972: grassy hills and a lake under the sweeping tent roofs of acrylic glass that cover the stadium, the arena and the swimming hall. The highest of the hills, the Olympiaberg, gives a view over the city and, on clear days, to the Alps. On the park's north-eastern edge, BMW Welt, the carmaker's showroom and delivery centre under a curving roof of glass and steel, is open to visitors, and next to it the bowl-shaped BMW Museum shows the company's cars and motorcycles at the foot of the four-cylinder tower of its headquarters. The U-Bahn station Olympiazentrum serves the park and the BMW buildings alike.

Oktoberfest fills the Theresienwiese, a broad open field a short walk south-west of the main station, from the second half of September into the first days of October. It opens on a Saturday with the tapping of the first barrel by the mayor at noon, and on its first Sunday a procession of costume groups, bands and riflemen winds through the city to the grounds. Inside, large beer tents stand beside fairground rides and stalls of roast chicken and sugared almonds, and the bronze statue of Bavaria watches over it all from the slope at the field's western edge; lederhosen and dirndls are worn by locals and visitors alike. Hotel rooms fill months ahead and tables in the tents are reserved long in advance; places without a reservation remain, and weekday mornings are the easiest time to find one. The crowds draw pickpockets, so bags stay closed and wallets go in front pockets.

From late November until Christmas Eve, the Christkindlmarkt fills Marienplatz and the pedestrian streets around it with wooden stalls of carved figures, glass ornaments, gingerbread, roasted almonds and mulled wine, under a tall Christmas tree in front of the New Town Hall. Smaller markets open across the city in the same weeks, in the old town's squares and courtyards and in the Englischer Garten at the foot of the Chinese Tower. The stalls are busiest after dark and at weekends, many take cash only, and hotel rooms in the city fill well ahead in December.