Munich Layover Near Hauptbahnhof

Munich Hauptbahnhof puts a 5,000-seat beer garden ten minutes’ walk west on Arnulfstraße and a free walled park three minutes north, enough to fill two or three hours without ever getting on a train into the Altstadt.

The Augustiner-Keller’s 5,000 seats under chestnut trees

Munich Hauptbahnhof’s north exit opens onto Arnulfstraße, and at number 52, behind a wall you would otherwise walk straight past, is the Augustiner-Keller: 5,000 seats under more than 100 chestnut trees, one of which has been standing for over two centuries.

It shows up on an 1812 city plan as a beer storehouse, which is what a Keller originally was: a cellar dug where the ground stayed cold, with trees planted over it to keep the sun off, and the drinking came later as a side effect of people turning up where the beer already was. The garden in its current shape dates from an 1896 rebuild. It is a ten-minute walk that gets you somewhere genuinely Bavarian without the Altstadt’s queues, and it is the closest thing to the real article you can reach on foot from a mainline platform.

Deutsche Bahn’s own lockers here run around the clock, opposite platforms 11 and 24, but the rebuild has taken banks of them out of service, so storage at the station is less of a given than its size suggests.

The Alter Botanischer Garten, a walled park behind the station

The Alter Botanischer Garten sits directly behind the station’s north side, through the neoclassical gate called the Kleine Propyläen. It stopped being a botanical garden in the 1910s when the collection moved to Nymphenburg, and what is left is a small walled park with a Neptune fountain at the south end, table tennis tables, a playground, and a café with its own beer garden. Nobody would call it a destination. As a place to sit down for twenty minutes with no ticket and no plan, three or four minutes from the platforms, it is exactly right.

The other direction is more interesting to walk through than to sit in. South of the tracks, Goethestraße, Schillerstraße and Landwehrstraße run down into the Bahnhofsviertel, which locals call Little Istanbul: Turkish supermarkets with the produce stacked out on the pavement, halal butchers, Balkan grills, Greek delicatessens, wedding-dress shops, and streets where the shop signs change language every block. The city’s own tourism office documents it as a neighbourhood walk rather than a warning, which tells you something about how the Bahnhofsviertel reputation and the Bahnhofsviertel reality have diverged. Individual places open and close often enough that naming one is a bad idea, but if you want to eat something that is not a station pretzel, this is where it is, and it is five minutes from the concourse.

The Bavaria statue over the Theresienwiese

Fifteen minutes south of the station, or one stop on the U4 or U5, the ground opens into the Theresienwiese: 42 hectares of gravel and grass that spend most of the year as nothing in particular and two weeks in autumn as Oktoberfest.

Standing over the western edge is Bavaria, 18.5 metres of bronze in a bearskin with a lion beside her, unveiled in 1850. Ludwig Schwanthaler modelled her and did not live to see her go up; Leo von Klenze set the scene behind her with the Doric colonnade of the Ruhmeshalle and its hundred-odd busts of Bavarian worthies; and the metal itself was cast from Turkish cannon salvaged after the Battle of Navarino. She was the first colossal statue since classical antiquity made entirely of cast bronze.

You can climb inside her. A staircase runs up through the body to a chamber in the head with four openings cut into the helmet, and the view out of them is the Theresienwiese, the Ruhmeshalle roof, and the city beyond. It is 5 euros, open daily 9am to 6pm from April to late October, and shut for the winter.

Train or bus back out to MUC

Both options leave from the same block. The S1 and S8 go from the platforms under the station and take about 40 minutes to the airport, alternating so that one or the other leaves roughly every 10 minutes; the S8 runs through the night, the S1 stops around midnight. The Airport-City-Day-Ticket at 17.50 euros pays for that ride plus everything else you use that day, which on a two-stop window it probably will not, so price a single against it before you buy.

The airport bus is the other option, leaving from Arnulfstraße 12 on the north side, taking about 45 minutes for 12.50 euros booked ahead. It has a luggage hold and no stairs anywhere in the process, which is a real argument if you are moving something heavy alone. Its last run toward the airport is around 7.55pm, though, so for the late departures this site is mostly written for, it is not actually on the table.

Either way, this is a window where the walking is flat, short and entirely optional, and where the one genuinely good thing within reach, a table under a chestnut tree with an hour to kill, works better without a case parked against your shin.