Top Things to Do in Munich

FlyStation Munich's vertical wind tunnel delivers the genuine physics of skydiving inside a controlled chamber. Instructors coach you in real time, reaching wind speeds that pin your cheeks back. The roar drowns out every other thought. The sensation of 200-kilometer-per-hour air pressing against your chest is impossible to intellectualize.

Two of Bavaria's signature experiences in a single day, managed privately: the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak, where the summit air is sharp and thin and the panorama on a clear day takes in the Austrian Inntal, the Swiss Alps, and the distant shimmer of the Italian Dolomites, four countries from one point of rock and ice, and Neuschwanstein Castle, Ludwig II's nineteenth-century fantasy of Wagnerian chivalry, perched on a limestone cliff above the valley with the sound of waterfalls rising from the gorge below.

Dachau sits seventeen kilometers northwest of Munich's city center. The private transfer resolves what would otherwise be an awkward transition. The journey by car becomes part of the experience itself, a chance to begin contextualizing with your guide before you arrive at the gate. Dachau was the first of the Nazi concentration camps, opened in 1933 and operational until the American liberation in 1945.

The Eagle's Nest, Hitler's mountaintop retreat above Berchtesgaden, now a restaurant operated in summer by a local hospitality cooperative, sits at nearly 1,900 meters on a ridge above the Bavarian-Austrian border. It is reached by a purpose-built tunnel blasted into the rock and a polished brass elevator that rises through the mountain itself. The views across the valley to the Hoher Göll and the Watzmann are extraordinary.

Germany's highest mountain is more accessible than its elevation suggests. The Zugspitze cable car rises from the electric green surface of Lake Eibsee, its color somewhere between turquoise and glacial meltwater, surrounded by dark pine forest and the massive limestone walls of the massif, to the summit in minutes. The transition from pine-scented valley air to cold, crystalline alpine clarity happens almost faster than the body can register.

Munich has a version of itself that it presents to tourists. Then it has the city its residents inhabit, which is considerably more interesting. This private host experience operates in the second Munich: the neighborhood bakeries where bread is dense and seeded and comes out of the oven at seven in the morning smelling of caraway and warm crust, the market stalls where produce is seasonal enough that the vendor knows which valley it came from, the covered arcades and inner courtyards that connect streets in ways that appear on no tourist map.

Munich was where Hitler launched the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, where the Nazi Party established its headquarters, and where Chamberlain signed the agreement that history has never forgiven him for. The geography of that period is still legible in the city if you know where to look, the Documentation Center on the former Brown House site, the neo-classical buildings designed to embody a specific vision of German greatness, the Führerbau where the Munich Agreement was signed in September 1938.