In 1158 a duke burned down a bridge that belonged to a bishop, so the salt road would have to cross the river at his village instead. That village is Munich.
It grew fast. A church, a wall, a market square. Within a century it had outgrown all three, and had to build a second wall around the first. The old market was pushed outward, the dukes moved in, and the city paid for a fortress built to face its own citizens.
Then it began taking itself apart. Walls came down. Monasteries became factories. Gates, towers and whole streets were cleared away by people certain they were improving things. In 1944 the bombing finished what the city had been doing to itself for centuries. Afterwards, Munich made a choice most German cities did not.
In between runs everything else. The first dukes and the wall they put around a market town. The Wittelsbachs taking the city and then holding it for seven hundred years. A duke of Munich crowned Holy Roman Emperor. A Bavaria split between heirs, fought over, stitched back together, and split again. Beer comes into it too, because it paid for a great deal of this.
A half day walking tour through the whole city and the whole history of Munich, from the first bridge to the city you are standing in today.
Four of the places where we stop. There is a great deal between them.
A duke burned down a bishop's bridge to divert the salt trade to his own village. Everything Munich became follows from that one act of sabotage.
Munich revolted against its rulers. The rulers made the citizens fund a castle, and pointed it inward. That building grew into the Residenz.
The city outgrew its first wall and built a second one around it, with gates, towers and a moat. Almost all of it came down. Its line is still there, under the ring road you crossed to get here.
After 1945 the city had to decide what to become, and chose to look like its own past. The tour ends with what that decision produced, standing in front of you.