Luitpoldbrücke & the Isar Meadows
Why is it significant?
Step down onto the grass of the riverbank and look back across the water: the stone bridge with its statues, and above it the golden angel on her column. Around you, the meadow slopes gently to a strip of pale gravel and the fast green river.
Key Facts
| Place | Luitpoldbrücke & the Isar Meadows |
|---|---|
| Address | Widenmayerstraße, 80538 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14210, 11.59340 |
| Part of Walk | River and Meadow: Munich's Isar, the Angel of Peace & the English Garden |
| Generated | Generated |
Step down onto the grass of the riverbank and look back across the water: the stone bridge with its statues, and above it the golden angel on her column. Around you, the meadow slopes gently to a strip of pale gravel and the fast green river. In summer this grass is a beach for half the neighbourhood.
The bridge you see exists because of a disaster. In September 1899, the same year the Angel of Peace was unveiled, a great flood came down the Isar and swept away the bridge that stood here. The replacement, opened in 1901, was built to be stronger, and it was decorated with four figures that stand for the old regions of Bavaria. The river had made its point.
For centuries the Isar was feared as much as loved. Its name may come from an old Celtic word meaning something like swift or rushing, and it lived up to it: floods tore away bridges, mills and timber yards again and again. Only in 1959, when the Sylvenstein dam was built far upstream in the mountains, did the floods become manageable.
Today the meadows along both banks are Munich's living room. On a warm day you will see people reading, playing guitar, cooling beer bottles in the shallows, and children building little dams out of stones. Some swim in the current, which is cold enough to make you gasp even in August... and fast enough to demand respect.
Stand still and look at the water for a while. The grey-green colour comes from fine rock flour, ground by glaciers in the Alps, still hanging in the current. You are, in a sense, looking at a mountain on its slow way to the Black Sea, because the Isar feeds the Danube. Now walk west, away from the river, through the quiet streets of Lehel along Prinzregentenstraße, until you reach a long, colonnaded stone building on your right.