Munich’s most famous event may never have happened the way it's told. The legend of the Schäfflertanz says that after the plague of 1517, the coopers were the first to dance in the streets again, coaxing terrified citizens out of their houses — a custom now performed every seven years. That seven-year rhythm is itself a clue: it likely grew from a guild tradition tied to carnival cycles, not a single epidemic. Still, the dance has become so central to the city’s identity that the figures twirl across the Glockenspiel in Marienplatz twice a day.
Audio guide Munich
Tella is a free audio guide for any place on Earth. Here are 30 places in Munich worth a story. Open one on the map and hear it read aloud in English, or take the Android app on a walk and let it narrate whatever you pass.
About Munich
Places worth a story
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
public university in Munich, Germany
Maxvorstadt has been Munich’s university quarter for so long that when the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays here in 1895, his lab sat a few streets from where the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität still stands. The university itself had already swallowed the whole district’s intellectual life: founded in 1472 in Ingolstadt, it moved to Munich in 1826 and now holds over fifty thousand students. The building you see carries the main lecture hall, but the institution spreads far beyond it. One detail that stuck: the White Rose resistance group dispersed its leaflets from this university’s atrium in 1943, and today a memorial stands in that same courtyard.
Photo: Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0
Munich Olympic Stadium
stadium located in Munich, Germany
Deutsches Museum
museum of science and technology in Munich, Germany
Nymphenburg Palace
Baroque palace in Munich, Bavaria, southern Germany
Photo: Original: Richard Bartz , Munich aka Makro Freak Derivative work: Crassic · CC BY-SA 2.5
Frauenkirche
church in Munich, Bavaria, Germany; cathedral of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising
The devil is said to have left his footprint in the floor of the Frauenkirche. As the story goes, he funded the church on the condition that it contain no windows — then, when he stepped inside to check, he saw only the columns, no glass at all. In triumph he stamped his foot, leaving a mark still pointed out near the entrance. The architect had simply hidden the windows from view at that one spot. Munich's cathedral, finished in 1488, holds an even stranger distinction: it is the largest hall church in the world.
Photo: Diliff · CC BY 2.5
Marienplatz
square in Munich, Germany
Napoleon occupied Munich in 1805, and the French tricolour flew over Marienplatz—but the square has been Munich's gathering point since the city was founded in 1158. It takes its name from the Mariensäule, the gilded statue of the Virgin Mary erected in 1638 to celebrate the end of Swedish occupation during the Thirty Years' War. For centuries it served as both marketplace and tournament ground, where medieval jousting took place and public executions drew crowds. The famous Glockenspiel in the New Town Hall tower re-enacts two sixteenth-century events daily: a royal wedding and the coopers' dance that followed a devastating plague.
Photo: Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0
Bavarian State Library
state library of the Free State of Bavaria
The Bavarian State Library owns more than ten million books — including one of the most important medieval manuscripts on Earth, the Carmina Burana. Those bawdy songs of drinking, gambling and love were discovered here in 1803, and Carl Orff turned them into his thunderous cantata eight centuries later. The copy held in Munich is the only complete one that survives.
The library was founded in 1558 by Duke Albrecht V, and it became a legal deposit library in 1663 — the first in the German-speaking world. That means every book published in Bavaria still arrives here by law.
Above the grand staircase on Ludwigstraße, golden letters spell out Bavaria's answer to the library of Alexandria.
New Town Hall
a town hall at the northern part of Marienplatz in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
Its famous glockenspiel has been re-enacting a royal wedding and a plague-surviving coopers’ dance for over a century, while tourists below tilt their heads in unison. The New Town Hall itself only arrived here in 1874, when Munich’s administration finally outgrew the Old Town Hall next door. Its neo-Gothic facade, with hundreds of sculptures, was deliberately built to look centuries older than it is. Inside, the city council still governs Munich from this landmark building. The town hall went up in an era when Munich wanted its civic architecture to rival any cathedral in the city.
Photo: Steffen Flor · CC BY-SA 4.0
Munich Residence
building in Munich, Upper Bavaria, Germany
From the 16th century until 1918, the Wittelsbach dukes, electors, and kings of Bavaria ruled from this sprawling complex — the Munich Residence. It grew with the ambitions of its occupants: a Renaissance palace became a Baroque one, then a Neoclassical one, until it stretched into the largest city palace in Germany. Today its ten courtyards and 130 rooms are a museum of royal living, but it’s also a working concert hall — the Herkulessaal, home to the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Photo: Bayreuth2009 · CC BY 3.0
Theatine Church
Catholic church in Munich, Germany
When Elector Ferdinand Maria and Henriette Adelaide finally had a son in 1662, after years of waiting, they promised God a church in return. Theatine Church is what they built — though it took almost thirty years to finish. The Italian architect Agostino Barelli modeled it on Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome, and its yellow façade and two towers became so identified with Munich that builders across southern Germany copied the style for decades. The church still stands as the burial place of several Bavarian rulers, including Ferdinand Maria himself.
Photo: Wilfredor · CC0
Braunes Haus
former building in Munich
Photo: This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal… · CC BY-SA 4.0
St. Peter's Church, Munich
a church in Munich
Known to every Munich local as Alter Peter, this is the oldest recorded parish church in the city — the point from which Munich itself is presumed to have grown. Its 91-metre tower has watched over the centre for centuries, and the climb to the top is a rite of passage. Inside, the high altar holds the gilded reliquary of St. Munditia, whose jewel-studded skeleton has been on display since the seventeenth century. It remains the only church in Munich’s old town still surrounded by its own cemetery walls.
Photo: Richard Huber · CC BY-SA 3.0
St. Michael's Church, Munich
church in Bavaria, Germany
Its crisp, whitewashed interior floods with light from hidden windows, but the most telling detail about St. Michael's Church is what lies below the choir. A vaulted crypt holds the tombs of forty-one members of the Wittelsbach dynasty, including the church's own founder, Duke Wilhelm V, and perhaps most famously, Ludwig II — the fairytale king who built Neuschwanstein. The story begins in the late 1500s, when Wilhelm V, a devout Catholic ruler, wanted a monumental church for the Jesuits. St. Michael's became the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps, its facade a prototype for countless later churches across the region. Ludwig's coffin was moved here in 1886, and his resting place has drawn pilgrims and the curious ever since.
Photo: Luidger · CC BY-SA 3.0
Asam Church
filial Roman Catholic church in Munich, Germany
Bavarian National Museum
art and cultural history museum in Munich, Germany
Photo: Avda · CC BY-SA 3.0
Odeonsplatz
square in Munich, Germany
The Feldherrnhalle loggia anchors Odeonsplatz, but the square earned its name from the Odeon concert hall that once stood here. Leo von Klenze built it in the 1820s for King Ludwig I, who wanted a forum of culture and power modeled on Rome. Hitler chose this spot for his failed Beer Hall Putsch march in 1923; sixteen of his followers died when police opened fire, and after 1933 the square became a shrine to them. Munich never fully shook that shadow until the 1990s, when the square reclaimed itself as a place people actually enjoy — concerts, cafés, and the start of Ludwigstrasse's grand sweep toward the Siegestor.
Photo: Gryffindor · Public domain
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