A Bavarian capital where royal patronage and beer-hall tradition have shared the same seven centuries.

Munich’s founding was an act of commercial opportunism: in 1158, Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, built a bridge over the Isar and burned down a rival bishop’s existing bridge and toll station downstream at Föhring, forcibly rerouting the lucrative salt trade from Reichenhall through his own new settlement — first recorded that same year as “Munichen,” from the Old High German for “by the monks,” after the Benedictine monastery already on the site. The Wittelsbach family took control of Bavaria in 1180 and went on to rule from Munich for 738 years, an almost unbroken run that ended only with the monarchy’s abolition in 1918; its final flourish came under Ludwig II, the so-called Fairytale King, whose obsession with Richard Wagner’s operas and medieval legend produced Neuschwanstein Castle from 1869 — left unfinished at his death in 1886, when he was found drowned in Lake Starnberg days after being declared unfit to rule, in circumstances still disputed today.

The twentieth century gave Munich a darker distinction: the Nazi Party was founded here in 1919, and Adolf Hitler staged his failed Beer Hall Putsch at the Bürgerbräukeller in 1923, a defeat the regime later mythologised once in power, when it named Munich “Capital of the Movement.” The city also produced its own resistance to that regime — the White Rose, a small group of Munich University students led by Sophie and Hans Scholl, was executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, and is now commemorated with a memorial on the university’s own square. Munich’s more festive traditions have proved sturdier: the first Oktoberfest was a royal wedding celebration in 1810 for Crown Prince Ludwig, held on fields at the city’s edge still called Theresienwiese after his bride, and the Hofbräuhaus, founded in 1589 as the royal court’s own brewery, still pours beer under the same purity law Bavaria enacted in 1516 — the Reinheitsgebot, among the oldest food-safety regulations still observed anywhere in the world.