English Garden Guided Tour

The English Garden has existed for over 230 years. 

It was the first park in the world that was conceived and designed for all citizens of a city. A new spirit of the times, the Enlightenment, made this possible. Artfully, an English landscape park was created from a “barren area” and ever since the popularity of this piece of garden art has remained unbroken.

Our English Garden tour takes you to the most beautiful places and lets you experience the walkable landscapes of this park.

A Park as soul and “green living room”

5 million visitors come to the English Garden every year and the number is still growing. With its 384 ha. the English Garden is the largest inner-city park in the world and extremely popular with Munich residents and visitors from all over the world. This was not always the way it is now! When the park was laid out shortly after the French Revolution, the citizens of Munich simply considered this idea of a place of recreation for the whole population to be a “folly”.

The history of it all

In the 18th century, only the nobility strolled through Munich’s gardens, which were open only to the upper classes. For the common people, access was barred, and the dusty streets outside the city, bare and without trees, did not exactly encourage strolls either. Thanks to Count Rumford a park for the common people was created where there used to be an area endangered by constant floods and wildly overgrown with alder thickets, birches and willows.

The statue of “Harmless” at the transition from the Hofgarten to the English Garden points the visitor in the right direction. Here it says: “Harmless / walks here / then returns / newly strengthened / to each / duty back.”

Garden artist at its best

A garden artist of a special kind, Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, transformed this area into an English landscape garden, in keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment. Instead of a baroque, axially symmetrical arrangement, as was still common in gardens up to that time, nature, which was equated with reason, was given free rein.

Really?