Englischer Garten

Central Park is 341 hectares. Hyde Park is 140. The Englischer Garten is 417 hectares, making it one of the largest urban parks in the world and bigger than both of those famous comparisons. It was created in 1789 by an American-born physicist named Benjamin Thompson — later Count Rumford — who convinced the Bavarian Elector Karl Theodor to transform a royal hunting ground into a public green space. An American designed Munich's most beloved park. History enjoys irony.

Thompson's vision was radical for its time: a park for all social classes, with no fences or admission fees, modelled on the English landscape garden tradition of rolling meadows, winding paths, and naturalistic plantings. The result is a park so convincingly natural that you forget someone designed it. Münchners use it as an extension of their living rooms — on warm days, entire families set up camp with picnics, barbecues, and footballs. The nude sunbathing in the Schönfeldwiese meadow is technically legal and thoroughly unsurprising to anyone who's spent time in Bavaria.

The park contains several distinct destinations. The Monopteros, a Greek-style temple on an artificial hill, offers panoramic views and excellent people-watching. The Japanese Tea House on an island in the park's lake hosts traditional tea ceremonies — a gift from Japan for the 1972 Olympics. And threaded through the whole landscape are streams, bridges, meadows, and wooded paths that make the city feel a thousand miles away.

What makes the Englischer Garten truly Munich is the combination of high culture and beer. You can watch surfers ride a standing wave, attend a Japanese tea ceremony, admire neoclassical architecture, and end up at one of Germany's largest beer gardens — all without leaving the park. No other city in Europe offers quite that sequence.