Karlstor & the Stachus: A Square Named After an Innkeeper
Why is it significant?
Stand under the Karlstor, the old city gate with its two stout round towers, and turn to face the traffic, the trams and the big fountain splashing on the square behind you.
Key Facts
| Place | Karlstor & the Stachus: A Square Named After an Innkeeper |
|---|---|
| Address | Karlsplatz, 80335 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.13900, 11.56680 |
| Part of Walk | Salt, Beer and Pretzels: A Food Lover's Walk Through Munich's Old Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand under the Karlstor, the old city gate with its two stout round towers, and turn to face the traffic, the trams and the big fountain splashing on the square behind you. Every Münchner you meet will call this place the Stachus... and very few of them will tell you that the name belongs to an innkeeper.
On the map it is Karlsplatz, named in 1797 after the Elector Karl Theodor. He came from the Palatinate, he never really loved Munich, and Munich never loved him back... he even explored a plan to swap Bavaria for the Austrian Netherlands. So the people quietly ignored his name. Instead they kept calling the square after a tavern that stood out here in the eighteenth century, run by a man called Eustachius Föderl. Stachus is simply the Bavarian short form of Eustachius.
Think about that for a moment. A prince gives the square his name, and a man who poured beer wins the argument, more than two hundred years later. If you want one sentence that explains this city, that is it: in Munich, the inn usually outlasts the throne.
The gate itself is far older than both of them. It was built in the fourteenth century as the Neuhauser Tor, the western gate of the second city wall, and only took Karl Theodor's name in 1791. Through this arch ran the old salt road, the east-west trade route that made Munich rich. Salt came in on carts from the east and left this way towards Augsburg, and every barrel paid the city a toll. Keep that in mind... salt is the first ingredient of this walk.
Before you go through, find the little bronze fountain on the right-hand side of the gate: a naked boy being spat at by a grinning faun. It is the Brunnenbuberl of 1895, and polite Munich society was scandalised by it at the time. Now walk through the arch into Neuhauser Straße, the great shopping street, and look out on the right for a tall gabled facade where the smell of roast pork drifts onto the pavement.