When the Beach Boys sang about a surfing safari in the 1960s, Munich was not on the itinerary. The Bavarian capital sits hundreds of kilometres from the nearest coastline, wedged between the Alps and the rolling farmland of southern Germany. And yet, for decades, surfers gathered daily at a bend in the Eisbach canal on the edge of the city's vast Englischer Garten to ride one of the world's most improbable waves.
That wave is now gone. Following a major clean-up of the Eisbach waterway late last year, the powerful standing wave known as Eisbachwelle simply ceased to exist. Local authorities have offered no firm explanation for why the hydraulic conditions that produced it have not returned, and their attempts to restore the surf break have, so far, come to nothing. The community of regulars who once packed the canal bank to watch riders attempt the short, intense ride has largely drifted away.
The loss is a minor civic frustration in the scheme of things. But it is an appropriate entry point for exploring what Munich's parks actually represent, because the English Garden and the nearby Olympiapark München are extraordinary public spaces freighted with history that goes well beyond a surfing curiosity.
The English Garden and Its Unusual Origins
The Englischer Garten was created in 1792 by Benjamin Thompson, an American-born British military officer, as a public park for the then 40,000 residents of Munich. Designed in the style of an English landscape park, it has grown to an expanse equivalent to roughly 640 soccer pitches, a scale that makes it a credible claimant to the title of the world's largest inner-city public park. It transitions from manicured open lawns near the city centre to dense forest and meadow further north, with streams threading through the whole.
The park survived the Nazi period with its name intact, a small but telling detail. It did not, however, escape the Allied bombing campaign of World War II, which damaged the Chinese Tower, a 25-metre timber pagoda folly that stands as one of the garden's most recognisable landmarks. The tower was subsequently rebuilt, and a biergarten now encircles it beneath the trees.
Before the bombing came an episode of a different kind. In 1939, Unity Mitford, a British aristocrat who had moved to Munich and cultivated a close friendship with Adolf Hitler, shot herself in the head within the park upon hearing that Britain had declared war on Germany. She survived, the bullet lodging in her brain, and was returned to England with Hitler's assistance. She died from her injuries in 1948. The story sits at an uncomfortable intersection of privilege, ideology, and self-destruction that the English Garden has never quite been able to shake.
Olympic Park and the Shadow of 1972
A short distance from the English Garden sits Olympiapark München, built for the 1972 Summer Olympics and now a sprawling recreational area for city residents. The park's main stadium remains an architectural achievement: its translucent Plexiglass roof, suspended by cables that sweep out into the surrounding approaches, was conceived in the mid-1960s and has rarely been matched for ambition or elegance in the decades since.
The 1972 Games are remembered, however, not for the architecture but for the worst act of political violence in Olympic history. Members of the Palestinian militant group Black September seized 11 Israeli athletes and officials during the Games. All 11 were killed, along with a West German police officer, in events that forced the Olympics to be suspended for the first and only time in their modern history. A full memorial, the Erinnerungsort Olympia-Attentat, was not erected until 2017, in a shaded corner of the park directly opposite the athletes' village where the crisis unfolded. That village still stands today as a residential estate for around 6,000 Munich residents.
The memorial is easy to miss. A triangular column carries the biographies of each victim, and a multimedia display cycles through television footage from the crisis itself. It is restrained in the way that German memorial culture often is, asking visitors to sit with discomfort rather than offering resolution.
Parks That Carry Their Past Lightly
What strikes a visitor most, perhaps, is how ordinary both parks feel on an average afternoon. Dogs run across open grass. Cyclists navigate shared paths. In warmer months, the English Garden hosts nude sunbathers in areas that surprise first-time visitors. The Olympic stadium hosts concerts. These are not museum pieces but living parts of a functioning city.
That ordinariness is, in its own way, the point. Munich, a city of 1.6 million people, has absorbed extraordinary events across two centuries of parkland history and continued on. The temporary loss of a beloved surf wave is, against that backdrop, something the city will almost certainly survive. Entry to the public areas of both the English Garden and Olympic Park remains free, as it has been for generations. For visitors making the journey, whether aboard a river cruise with APT or by other means, both parks reward time far beyond what their brochure descriptions suggest.
As for the Eisbach Wave, Munich's surfing community is waiting. The city's authorities have not given up, even if progress has been slow. If the wave returns, it will join two parks that have seen considerably more turbulent waters than anything a river canal can produce.