River and Meadow: Munich's Isar, the Angel of Peace & the English Garden

From a palace built for bathing to a lake at the top of the park: Munich's wild Alpine river, its islands and bridges, and the people's garden an American count dreamed up in 1789

Munich · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Müller'sches Volksbad: A Palace for Washing

Rosenheimer Straße 1, 81667 München, Germany

Stand on the riverbank by the Ludwigsbrücke and look at the building with the copper domes and the tall tower: it could pass for a church, a town hall, or the palace of a minor prince. It is none of these. Behind those walls are swimming pools, steam rooms and, once, rows of bathtubs for people who had none at home.

The Müller'sches Volksbad, the People's Bath, opened in 1901. It is named after Karl Müller, an engineer who gave a large part of his fortune to the city on one condition: that it build a bath for the working people of Munich. At the time, most flats in this crowded part of town had no bathroom at all. People washed at a basin in the kitchen, or went without.

The architect Carl Hocheder took the brief and wildly overdelivered. Inside, the great pool lies under a barrel vault like a Roman basilica, the smaller one under a dome, and the walls bloom with the flowing lines and plant ornament of Jugendstil, the German Art Nouveau. There is even a Roman-Irish steam bath, with warm marble benches and a cold plunge. When it opened, it was one of the most lavish public baths in Europe... and it was built for the poor.

In its early decades, men and women bathed separately, and the cheap tubs and showers downstairs were as important as the pools. Today the building is still a working public bath, and swimming lengths here feels a little like swimming through a cathedral.

Why build it here, right on the riverbank? Because Munich has always lived with the Isar, the wild green river that comes down from the Alps. This walk follows it north, over islands and bridges, into the great park that the river feeds. Now head north along the riverside path on this eastern bank, and cross the little footbridge onto the island in the middle of the Isar.
2. Praterinsel: Munich's Vienna in the Middle of the River

Praterinsel 3, 80538 München, Germany

Stop on the footbridge and lean on the railing: below you the Isar rushes past, green and fast, breaking white over a weir. Ahead lies a long island of trees and old brick buildings, with water on both sides. You are standing on one of the few islands of this restless river.

The island's name, Praterinsel, is a little joke about Vienna. In the early 1800s an innkeeper opened a pleasure garden here, with music, dancing and refreshments, and he borrowed the name of the famous Prater park in the Austrian capital. Later the island turned industrious: for much of the twentieth century a liqueur distillery worked here. Now its old halls are used for art and events, and one of its villas has housed the Alpine Museum of the German Alpine Club since 1911.

That museum is in the right place, because this river is a mountain river. The Isar rises in the Karwendel range in Tyrol and runs some three hundred kilometres to the Danube. It carries meltwater and gravel, and on a clear day the water has that milky, cold green colour of the high Alps. In summer, rafts loaded with musicians and beer still float down towards Munich from upstream, a tradition from the days when timber travelled by water.

For a century the city tried to tame its river, straightening it into a stone channel. Then, from 2000 to 2011, Munich did something brave: in the Isar Plan, it tore out long stretches of concrete south of the old town and gave the river back its gravel banks, shallows and islands. Flood protection improved, and so did life on the banks. Today, on a hot afternoon, thousands of people sunbathe, swim and grill along the water.

Listen for a moment, and you will notice that the city noise fades under the sound of the weir. Now cross back to the eastern bank and climb the slope towards the grand building with the arches and the golden mosaics, crowning the high bank above the river.
3. Maximilianeum: Parliament and Scholars on the High Bank

Max-Planck-Straße 1, 81675 München, Germany

Stand at the foot of the ramps and look up at the long façade of arches crowning the high riverbank, with gold mosaics glinting in the upper windows. From down here it seems to float above the trees of the slope. Turn around, and you will see why it was built exactly here: it closes the long, straight vista of Maximilianstraße, running all the way from the old town.

This is the Maximilianeum, commissioned by King Maximilian the Second and built from 1857 to 1874 by the architect Friedrich Bürklein. Maximilian wanted his own style, neither Greek like his father Ludwig's buildings nor Gothic, but a new blend for a new age. He did not live to see it finished; he died in 1864, ten years before the last stone was set.

What the king did see clearly was its purpose. The Maximilianeum was built as a home for a foundation for the most gifted young people of Bavaria, regardless of their family's wealth. And here is the surprise: the foundation still exists. Exceptional students still live in this building for free while they study at Munich's universities, under the same roof as... the parliament.

Because since 1949 the Maximilianeum has also been the seat of the Bavarian Landtag, the state parliament. After the destruction of the war, Bavaria needed a house for its new democracy, and it found one in a royal school for talent. So the students have lawmakers for neighbours, and the lawmakers work above a gallery of historic paintings that the king commissioned to show the great moments of world history.

Along the slopes below you stretch the Maximiliansanlagen, park gardens laid out on the steep bank in the second half of the nineteenth century, with winding paths and old trees. They are the green hinge between the river and the city on the hill. Now follow the paths north through these gardens along the high bank, and watch for a golden figure rising on a column above the trees.
4. Friedensengel: The Golden Angel of Peace

Prinzregentenstraße, 81675 München, Germany

Climb the steps beside the fountain and the cascades, and stop on the terrace beneath the column. High above you, a golden angel spreads her wings over the city, glowing even on a grey day. Below, Prinzregentenstraße runs straight as a ruler across the river and into the old town.

Munich people simply call it the Friedensengel, the Angel of Peace. It was unveiled in 1899 to celebrate twenty-five years of peace after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871. Bavaria had fought on the Prussian side, and out of that war came the new German Empire.

And that is the quiet paradox of this place. An angel of peace, yes... but the peace it celebrates was the peace of the victors, sealed with a war that left deep bitterness in France. Look closely at the golden mosaics in the hall below the column: allegories of war, victory and peace, gleaming like a promise. Less than twenty years after the unveiling, the First World War began.

Still, it is hard not to love the place. The column rises from a small temple-like hall, and from the terrace the view sweeps down over the trees of the riverbank to the bridge and the roofs beyond. On summer evenings people sit on the steps with a drink and watch the sunset turn the angel to fire. Couples come here for photos, joggers come here to suffer, climbing the stairs again and again.

Look down the slope and notice how carefully the whole ensemble was planned with the landscape: the fountain, the stairs, the bridge and the avenue form one axis, so that the river becomes part of the architecture. Munich builders at the turn of the century used the Isar like a stage set. Now walk down the stairs, cross the bridge over the river, and stop on the meadow on the far bank to look back at the angel.
5. Luitpoldbrücke & the Isar Meadows

Widenmayerstraße, 80538 München, Germany

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.
6. Haus der Kunst: A Building That Faces Its Past

Prinzregentenstraße 1, 80538 München, Germany

Walk along the row of heavy square columns at the front of the long stone building, and feel how it is made to make you small. No ornament, no curve, just mass and repetition. At the corner, you may hear shouts and splashes from the bridge: that is the famous standing wave of the Eisbach, where surfers ride a river in the middle of the city.

This is the Haus der Kunst, and its history needs to be told plainly. It was built from 1933 to 1937 as the House of German Art, designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, Hitler's favourite architect, and it was the first monumental building of the Nazi regime. Hitler laid the foundation stone himself in October 1933. The story goes that the ceremonial hammer broke in his hand, and that superstitious Munich read it as an omen.

It opened in July 1937 with the Great German Art Exhibition, a show of officially approved painting and sculpture. The very next day, a few hundred metres away in the Hofgarten arcades, the regime opened the exhibition of so-called degenerate art, designed to mock modern artists, many of whom were driven into exile, banned from working, or persecuted. Two exhibitions, one city, one message.

After the war the building served the American army, among other things as an officers' club. Then, slowly, it was turned against its origins. In 1955 it showed a great Picasso exhibition, including Guernica, his painting of a town destroyed by German bombers. Since then it has become a house for contemporary art from all over the world, and it has repeatedly put its own Nazi past on display rather than hiding it.

It is a strange thing to stand here, in a park built for pleasure, beside a building designed for propaganda. The trees behind it do not care. Now walk round the building into the English Garden, and follow the path north along the stream until you see a small wooden house on an island.
7. The Japanese Teahouse: A Gift of 1972

Englischer Garten, 80539 München, Germany

Stop by the water and look across to the little island: a low wooden house with paper screens and a gently curving roof, surrounded by carefully shaped pines and stones. A small bridge leads over. After the stone giant you just left, this feels like someone lowered their voice.

This is the Japanese Teahouse, called Kanshoan, and it was built in 1972, the year Munich hosted the Olympic Games. It was connected with the Urasenke school of tea from Kyoto, one of the great traditions of the Japanese tea ceremony. At certain times, tea masters still perform the ceremony here: every gesture prescribed, every bowl turned just so, a ritual of stillness in the middle of a busy city park.

The year 1972 carries a heavy memory in Munich. The Olympic Games were meant to show a new, open, democratic Germany, and in many ways they did. But they are also remembered for the attack by Palestinian terrorists on the Israeli team, in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered, along with a West German police officer. This quiet house belongs to the hopeful side of that summer.

The setting tells a second story too. The water around the island is part of the network of streams that run through the English Garden, all of it fed by the Isar. The Eisbach, the ice brook, flows nearby, cold and fast enough to carry swimmers who are foolish enough to jump in. The garden was designed so that water would always be close: you hear it before you see it.

Japanese gardens and English landscape gardens share one secret: both pretend to be natural, and both are entirely designed. Every pine and every bend of the stream here was placed by someone. Now continue north along the path, and the trees will open onto a huge, sunny meadow.
8. Schönfeldwiese: The People's Meadow

Englischer Garten, 80539 München, Germany

Walk out of the trees onto the open grass and let your eyes travel: a wide green meadow, scattered with picnic blankets, frisbees and dogs, and on a little hill ahead, a round white temple. Over to the side, the Eisbach slides by between its banks. And yes... some of the sunbathers here are wearing nothing at all.

This is the Schönfeldwiese, and it is the heart of the oldest part of the English Garden. The park's story begins in 1789, when the ruler of Bavaria, Elector Karl Theodor, agreed to turn a stretch of hunting ground along the Isar into a garden. The idea came from an American soldier and scientist in his service, Benjamin Thompson, whom you will meet properly in a few minutes.

The man who gave it shape was the landscape architect Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell. Instead of the straight avenues and clipped hedges of a French palace garden, he created the illusion of wild nature: meadows like this one, groves, winding streams, distant views. And radically for the time, it was a garden for everyone, not just the court. Today the English Garden is larger than New York's Central Park.

As for the nude sunbathers: Munich made peace with them long ago. Parts of this meadow are officially set aside for sunbathing without clothes, and generations of tourists have walked into the scene, stopped, and suddenly become very interested in the trees. Locals barely notice. It is part of a very Bavarian idea of freedom: live and let live, as long as you are not bothering anyone.

Look around and count the uses of one meadow: football, yoga, reading, napping, slacklining, a birthday party, a lone trumpet player practising scales. Two centuries ago, this was considered a radical social experiment. Now cross the meadow and climb the little hill to the round temple at the top.
9. Monopteros: Klenze's Temple on a Man-Made Hill

Englischer Garten, 80538 München, Germany

Climb the last few steps of the hill, walk in among the slender columns, and turn to face south-west. There it is: the skyline of old Munich, the twin towers of the Frauenkirche with their onion domes, church spires and green copper roofs, all framed by the trees of the park. This is the postcard view, and it was designed to be exactly that.

The Monopteros is a small round temple of Ionic columns, built between 1832 and 1836 by Leo von Klenze for King Ludwig the First, the same pair who gave Munich its Greek museums. The name is Greek for a round temple with a single ring of columns and no walls. It was placed on top of an artificial hill, which means that you are standing on a landscape that someone made by hand.

That is the whole philosophy of the English Garden in one spot. The meadow, the hill, the temple, the view: all of it is arranged like a painting, so that a stroll becomes a series of pictures. Sckell called this kind of view a framed scene, and he planted the trees so that the city's towers would appear just where the eye wants to rest.

The temple has had many lives. In the 1960s and 1970s it became a gathering place for hippies, with guitars and long nights under the columns, and the police and the park administration were not always amused. Today it is a meeting point for sunset watchers, teenagers and tired tourists, and on summer evenings the steps are packed.

Put your hand on one of the columns and look down at the grass sloping away on every side. Nobody built a monument to the hill itself, which may be the most hard-working thing here. Now walk down the north side of the hill and follow the path north, past the meadows and towards a small white house near the famous wooden tower.
10. Rumford House: The American Count Who Made a Park

Englischer Garten, 80538 München, Germany

Walk up to the small, pale building with the classical front, standing among the trees not far from the wooden pagoda of the Chinese Tower. Today it is a nature and culture centre where children come to learn about plants and animals. But its name belongs to one of the strangest careers in European history.

The Rumfordschlössl was built in 1791 as an officers' mess for the garden in its earliest form. It is named after Benjamin Thompson, born in 1753 in Massachusetts, who sided with the British in the American Revolution and had to leave his homeland. He ended up in Munich, in the service of Elector Karl Theodor, reorganising the Bavarian army... and then, it seems, reorganising everything else.

Thompson was a physicist, an inventor and a social reformer all at once. He designed more efficient stoves and fireplaces, pushed Bavarians to eat the potato, which many still regarded with suspicion, and invented a cheap, nourishing soup for the poor that is still known as Rumford soup. On New Year's Day 1790 he had Munich's beggars gathered up and sent to a workhouse, where they were fed and made to work: humane for its time, ruthless by ours.

He also believed that soldiers should have gardens to grow vegetables, and that the people needed fresh air. That idea, proposed in 1789, became the English Garden. In 1792 he was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire and took the name Rumford, after the town in New Hampshire where he had married. Later he left Munich, helped found the Royal Institution in London, and died near Paris in 1814.

So the most Bavarian of parks, with its beer and brass bands, was dreamed up by an American loyalist with a passion for soup. Now leave the house and follow the paths north through the meadows and over the stream, towards the open water of the park's lake.
11. Kleinhesseloher See: The Lake at the End of the Path

Kleinhesselohe, 80802 München, Germany

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.