Munich in 3 days

Ludwig I founded it in 1836 to put his Wittelsbach inheritance on public view, and Leo von Klenze gave it a shape — a long top-lit gallery block, painting light falling from above — that museums from Kassel to St Petersburg copied for a century. Bombs gutted it in 1944; Hans Döllgast rebuilt it between 1952 and 1957 without disguising the wound, patching the shattered south front in plain salvaged brick. Circle that façade before you go in: the seam between Klenze's sandstone and Döllgast's brick is the most honest thing in the Kunstareal, and Döllgast's cathedral-scale open staircase inside is the best room in the building that holds no paintings. Upstairs, the largest hall was built around Rubens' Great Last Judgement, and the Rubens holding — roughly seventy works, including the Massacre of the Innocents and the honeysuckle-bower portrait of the painter with Isabella Brant — has no rival anywhere. Give equal time to Altdorfer's Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529), an entire cosmos crammed into a metre and a half, Dürer's Self-Portrait of 1500 and Four Apostles, Leonardo's Madonna of the Carnation, and Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne. Hours: Tuesday 10.00–20.00, Wednesday to Sunday 10.00–18.00, closed Mondays. Admission €7, reduced €5, €1 on Sundays — though the audio guide, free the rest of the week, costs €4.50 then. The €12 day ticket adds the Pinakothek der Moderne, Museum Brandhorst, Schack Collection and Glyptothek, all within a ten-minute walk. Come Tuesday evening instead: the coach groups have gone and the late light suits the Rembrandts. Afterwards, Maxvorstadt's student streets are two blocks north — Türkenstraße for schnitzel at Alter Simpl, Schellingstraße for the Schelling-Salon and its century-old billiard tables.

Schellingstraße 54, a five-minute walk from the Alte Pinakothek, has poured coffee since 1872, when the Mehr family opened a billiards hall in what was then the fringe of Schwabing's student quarter. Five generations later it is still family-run, and the room has the honest patina of a place that never gutted itself for a refit: stucco ceiling, wainscoting, a wall of framed photographs and news clippings, and — the reason people originally came — four full-size billiards tables in the back room, the oldest dating to the founding year. Lenin plotted here, Kandinsky drank here, and the guest book claims Thomas Mann, Rilke and, less proudly, Hitler among the regulars. The place leans into the history without embalming it: the menus are photocopied, the waiters are brisk, and nobody performs the past for you. Come for lunch on a weekday. Kitchen and café run Monday and Thursday through Sunday from 09:00 to 01:00; the salon is closed Tuesday and Wednesday, which catches out more visitors than anything else. The daily specials board is the thing to order — Schweinebraten with dumplings, Käsespätzle, Wiener Schnitzel with potato salad — typically €11–€15, with breakfast plates around €8–€12 and a Weissbier near €4.50. Billiards costs roughly €9 per hour per table; ask at the counter and they'll switch the lamp on. Cash is welcome and simplest. The insider move: skip the front room where everyone sits and take a back table by the billiards, where the light is better and the noise drops. Order a Milchkaffee after the plates are cleared and stay an hour — nobody will rush you, which is the actual point of a Munich café. Afterwards, the Pinakotheken are three minutes north, and Türkenstraße's bookshops and cafés run parallel one street over — the old Schwabing that the guidebook version of the neighbourhood has mostly priced out.

Founded in Munich in 1916, BMW anchors its own quarter north of the Olympiapark, and the two buildings here are best read as a pair. The museum bowl — Münchners call it the Salatschüssel, the salad bowl — is Karl Schwanzer's 1973 counterpart to the four-cylinder tower beside it, gutted and rebuilt in 2008 into a 5,000 m² spiral of white ramps. BMW Welt opposite is Coop Himmelb(l)au's 2007 double cone of glass and torqued steel, free to enter and among Bavaria's most-visited buildings. Museum hours: Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, closed Mondays; adults €10, reduced €7, family ticket €24, under-6s free. BMW Welt: daily 09:00–18:00, with the hall itself unlocked from 07:30. Inside the museum, don't rush past the Kinetik installation — 714 chrome spheres on wires that swarm into car silhouettes overhead — then find the 1937 328 Mille Miglia roadster, the turbine-shaped M1 prototypes, and the Isetta bubble cars that kept the company solvent through the 1950s. Insider tip: cross to BMW Welt's upper Premiere level around midday on a weekday and watch new owners collect their cars off the turntable, staged with spotlights and a countdown — pure theatre, and nobody moves you along. Book the two-hour Plant Munich tour (about €15, German or English) weeks ahead; it's the only way onto the assembly line, and cameras stay in the locker. Eat at Bavarie, the bistro under the cone, for Weisswurst and a Helles at a fair price; Esszimmer upstairs holds two Michelin stars if you're marking an occasion. Afterwards the Olympiapark's lake and 1972 tent roofs are a five-minute walk, and U3 Olympiazentrum sets you down between the two.

Elector Ferdinand Maria commissioned the villa in 1664 to mark the birth of an heir; Agostino Barelli built the Italianate core, and Joseph Effner and François de Cuvilliés later stretched it into the kilometre-wide baroque front you see today. Start in the Steinerner Saal, Johann Baptist Zimmermann's rococo banqueting hall, then the Schönheitengalerie — 36 portraits Ludwig I commissioned from Joseph Stieler, where the shoemaker's daughter Helene Sedlmayr hangs in the same room as the dancer Lola Montez, whose affair with the king cost him his throne. The Marstallmuseum in the south wing holds Ludwig II's gilded state coaches and the sleigh he had rigged with battery lamps for night rides. Palace, Marstallmuseum and porcelain collection open daily 9:00–18:00 from April to 15 October, 10:00–16:00 in winter. The four park pavilions close entirely from mid-October to March. Combination ticket €15 in summer, €12 in winter; palace alone €8; the park is free, open from 6:00 until dusk. Under-18s enter free. Leave the central axis for later and walk south into the trees to the Amalienburg, Cuvilliés' 1739 hunting lodge — its silver-and-blue Hall of Mirrors is the finest rococo interior in Bavaria and is usually empty at opening. Eat at the Schlosscafé im Palmenhaus, in the former palm house behind the north wing, or take Bavarian standards under the chestnuts at the Schwaige beer garden in the south wing. This is Neuhausen-Nymphenburg, a quiet residential district 6 km from Marienplatz; tram 17 stops at the head of the canal. In hard winters locals play Eisstockschießen on the ice there. The botanical garden sits at the park's north gate, and the Hirschgarten — Munich's largest beer garden, complete with deer paddock — is a 20-minute walk south.

Perched on a rocky spur above the Pöllat Gorge, Neuschwanstein was begun in 1869 for Ludwig II of Bavaria — not by an architect at all, but by Christian Jank, a theatre set designer, with engineers Eduard Riedel and Georg von Dollmann making his stage fantasies stand up in limestone. Ludwig died in 1886 with only about 15 of the planned 200 rooms finished; the castle opened to paying visitors seven weeks later. The unfinished quality is the point: you walk from the Byzantine gold of the Throne Hall, its apse empty where the throne was never installed, into the Singers' Hall built for Wagner operas that were never performed there. Interiors are accessible by timed guided tour only, roughly 9:00–18:00 April to mid-October and 10:00–16:00 in winter (closed 24, 25 and 31 December, 1 January). Adult admission is €21, reduced €20, under-18s free, plus a €2.50 online booking fee — reserve at hohenschwangau.de weeks ahead for summer slots. The tour runs about 30 minutes and is briskly paced. From Munich, take the regional train to Füssen (about 2 hours; the Bayern-Ticket at €29 for one traveller covers the round trip) then bus 73 or 78 to Hohenschwangau. Insider tip: book the earliest slot, walk up rather than taking the shuttle, and cross Marienbrücke before the 11:00 crowds — or skip the bridge entirely for the Tegelberg cable car, which gives you the castle against the whole Alpine chain. Hohenschwangau village itself is a ticket-office monoculture. Walk 10 minutes to the Alpsee shore instead, where the crowds evaporate, or eat at Schlossrestaurant Neuschwanstein for Allgäuer Käsespätzle and Kaiserschmarrn. Better still, base yourself in Füssen — the Altstadt's Baroque lanes and the Hohes Schloss are worth the extra afternoon.

Opened in March 1933, weeks after Hitler took power, Dachau was the prototype: the SS built later camps on its ground plan, and the rulebook Theodor Eicke wrote here became the template for the whole system. What survives is deliberately partial — two of 34 barracks reconstructed when the memorial opened in 1965, the foundations of the rest laid out as gravel rectangles down the Lagerstraße, and the original maintenance building holding a dense, document-heavy permanent exhibition. Walk the full length to the Bunker, the camp prison that held clergy and prominent inmates, then cross the bridge to Barrack X and the crematorium area — quieter and far less visited than the main axis. Practical: daily 09:00–17:00, closed 24 December; entry free. Audio guide €4.50 (€3.50 reduced); English guided tours at 11:00 and 13:00, €4, roughly 2.5 hours. The documentary screens in English several times a day, so time your arrival to it. From München Hauptbahnhof take the S2 to Dachau (25 min), then bus 726 to KZ-Gedenkstätte; an MVV day ticket runs about €10, parking €3. Three post-war religious memorials anchor the north end: Josef Wiedemann's Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel (1960), Hermann Zvi Guttmann's Jewish memorial (1967), and Helmut Striffler's Church of Reconciliation (1967) — a low descent in raw concrete that is the most serious piece of architecture on the site. Insider tip: arrive at opening, before the coach groups; three hours is a realistic minimum, and the exhibition rewards reading rather than skimming. Eat afterwards rather than here — the visitor-centre café is functional at best. Dachau's Altstadt, uphill from the station, is a Renaissance market town with Schloss Dachau, a Hofgarten terrace over the Amper valley, and beer gardens most day-trippers never notice.

Oskar von Miller, the engineer behind Germany's first long-distance power transmission, founded this place in 1903 on the principle that machines should be understood by hand, not admired behind glass. Gabriel von Seidl designed the vast stone complex on the Isar's Kohleninsel; it opened in 1925, on Miller's seventieth birthday. The scale still overwhelms: Benz's Patent-Motorwagen, U1 (the first German submarine, sliced open lengthwise), Lilienthal's glider, and the laboratory bench where Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann detected nuclear fission in 1938. Open daily 09:00–17:00, closed 24, 25 and 31 December and 1 January. Adults pay €15, reduced €8, under-18s free; the Verkehrszentrum transport halls in Schwanthalerhöhe and the Flugwerft at Oberschleißheim are separate museums on separate tickets. Renovation continues on the eastern wings, so check which halls are open before planning a route. Do not treat it as a walk-through. Pick two floors and time your visit around the demonstrations — the high-voltage hall, where a caged operator draws metre-long artificial lightning, is the one to catch, and the schedule is posted at the entrance rather than online. The reconstructed mine descends two storeys below ground and takes 45 minutes on its own. Skip the cafeteria. Cross the Ludwigsbrücke into the Au and eat at Wirtshaus in der Au on Lilienstraße, the local reference point for Semmelknödel, or stop at the Müllersches Volksbad by the same bridge, a 1901 Jugendstil bathhouse still open for swimming. The island sits between the Glockenbachviertel and Haidhausen, so an afternoon here folds naturally into an evening in either. Tram 16 or S-Bahn to Isartor; the walk up the gravel banks from Reichenbachbrücke beats both.

The Augustiner-Keller on Arnulfstraße 52 has been pouring since 1812, though the brewery behind it goes back to 1328, when Augustinian monks brewed beside the Frauenkirche. The site was chosen for what lies beneath: lager cellars cut into the gravel terrace and packed with ice hauled from winter ponds, with chestnuts planted overhead to keep the ground cold. Those trees, many well past a century old, now shade roughly 5,000 seats — the oldest and least polished of Munich's great Kellers, no brewery-branded parasols, gravel underfoot instead of decking. Open daily from around 11:00 until midnight, kitchen closing near 22:00; the garden runs spring to mid-October, weather permitting. Order Edelstoff vom Holzfass — the firmer, paler sibling of ordinary Helles, still hand-tapped from wooden barrels — at roughly €11.50 a Maß. Eat from the self-service counters at the back: Steckerlfisch, a whole mackerel brined and grilled upright on a stick over charcoal (about €16), half a Hendl (around €14), Obatzda with a Breze (about €9). The insider move is understanding the two halves of the garden. The waiter-served section brings you a menu and a bill; the self-service side is where Bavarian law lets you bring your own food, and locals do — bread, radishes, sausage, spread out on the bare table. Rinse your Maßkrug at the stone fountain first, the way everyone around you will. Arnulfstraße runs west from Hauptbahnhof along the rail lines, a workaday edge of Maxvorstadt. Come on foot from the Alte Pinakothek in the late afternoon, or walk fifteen minutes south to Theresienwiese, where the Oktoberfest tents stand on otherwise empty gravel.