Munich Audio Tours

Munich was founded in 1158 by Henry the Lion, who destroyed a bridge upstream on the Salt Road and forced all the salt trade through his new crossing instead, then charged tolls. The Wittelsbach dynasty ruled Bavaria from Munich for 738 years after that, and their ambitions still define the city's skyline. The Residenz palace in the heart of the old town is a ten-courtyarded complex of baroque, rococo, and neoclassical halls that expanded over four centuries. The Marienplatz, the city's main square, is anchored by the Neues Rathaus, a neo-Gothic confection completed in 1908 whose glockenspiel tower enacts the story of a 1568 joust at 11am and noon daily, and every tourist watches it and every local pretends it does not exist.

The English Garden, laid out from 1789 on the orders of the American-born Bavarian court administrator Benjamin Thompson, is 373 hectares of parkland running through the heart of Munich, larger than New York's Central Park.

At the Eisbach, a narrow artificial channel at the park's southern edge, a standing wave created by a concrete sluice has been ridden by surfers continuously since the 1970s, all year, in wetsuits when necessary. The river Isar runs through the city and in summer Munich residents colonize its sandy banks for sunbathing in a matter-of-fact way that surprises visitors who expected more propriety from a German city.