Explore Munich in Google Street View

Munich is a useful place to start in Germany because the Street View imagery is recent. The country's coverage was frozen at 2011 for over a decade after the privacy argument of 2010, and the cars only returned in June 2023. Munich was among the first cities rephotographed, so what you see is current rather than fifteen years old, and the blurred buildings that still pepper older German imagery are far rarer here.

What you are looking at is largely a reconstruction, and the city made a deliberate choice about how to do it. Munich was heavily bombed, and in the post-war debate about rebuilding it chose to restore the historic street plan and the old frontages rather than replace them with something modern, which several other German cities did. The result reads as older than it is. Buildings on Marienplatz that look medieval were finished in the 1950s to medieval drawings.

Marienplatz is the centre and the Neues Rathaus dominates it, a neo-Gothic town hall completed in 1908 that is far more elaborate than the genuinely old church tower standing behind it. The glockenspiel is set into the facade about halfway up. Directly south, the Viktualienmarkt has been a food market since 1807 and is open air, permanent and covered on foot, so you can move between the stalls rather than looking at them from the road.

The Englischer Garten is the reason to spend real time here. Laid out in 1789 and larger than Central Park, it is landscaped English-style rather than formal, and much of it was captured on foot. At the southern end, where the Eisbach canal comes out from under a bridge, a standing wave forms that people have been surfing since the 1970s. It is legal now, it runs all year, and it is genuinely there in the imagery: surfers queuing on a riverbank in the middle of a landlocked city.

For the twentieth century, go to the Olympiapark. Built for the 1972 Games, its tent-like acrylic roof was engineered to look light and open, deliberately unlike the architecture of the 1936 Berlin Games, and it is still one of the most inventive structures of its decade. The park around it is covered on foot and the artificial hill in the middle is made of war rubble, which is a fairly direct piece of city history.

Theresienwiese is worth opening if only to see it empty. It is a large flat field just south-west of the centre with a bronze statue at one end, and for fifty weeks a year that is all it is. For the other two it holds Oktoberfest and six million people. The Street View imagery almost always shows it as the field, which is a better sense of the scale than any photograph of the tents.