Kleinhesseloher See: The Lake at the End of the Path
Why is it significant?
Come down to the shore and let the view open up: a wide lake with three small wooded islands, rowing boats drifting between them, swans and ducks patrolling the edges. On the far side, a lakeside beer garden fills with people on any warm afternoon.
Key Facts
| Place | Kleinhesseloher See: The Lake at the End of the Path |
|---|---|
| Address | Kleinhesselohe, 80802 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.15800, 11.59500 |
| Part of Walk | River and Meadow: Munich's Isar, the Angel of Peace & the English Garden |
| Generated | Generated |
Come down to the shore and let the view open up: a wide lake with three small wooded islands, rowing boats drifting between them, swans and ducks patrolling the edges. On the far side, a lakeside beer garden fills with people on any warm afternoon. After all the history, this is a place to simply sit down.
The Kleinhesseloher See was dug at the start of the nineteenth century, when the English Garden was extended northwards. It takes its name from Kleinhesselohe, an old hamlet and inn that once stood on this edge of the city's fields. Like everything else in the park, the lake only pretends to be natural: its islands, its curving shores and its views across the water were all planned.
Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell shaped the park for decades, and near the lake a memorial remembers him. It is a fitting place for it, because this is where his idea is most complete: water, trees and meadow arranged so cleverly that thousands of people every summer believe they have escaped the city, while the city is still all around them.
And the city is around them. North of the lake, the park continues for kilometres along the Isar, wilder and quieter, almost a forest, with paths along the river where you can walk for an hour without seeing a building. In winter, when it is cold enough and the city allows it, people have skated on the frozen surface of this very lake.
Think back over the path you have walked. You started at a palace built so that poor people could wash, crossed an island named after Vienna, passed a parliament that shares its house with students, an angel celebrating a victors' peace, a bridge rebuilt after a flood, a building that confronts its Nazi past, a teahouse from 1972, a meadow of free spirits, a temple on a hand-made hill, and the house of an American count. All of it held together by one wild green river. Sit down by the water... the walk is over, and the lake does the rest.