Surf
There is a wave in Munich. Not a wave machine, not a surf park. An actual standing wave in a river channel, in the middle of a city park, two minutes from a beer garden.
The Eisbach is a man-made channel that runs through the Englischer Garten. At one point near the Museum Island bridge, the water rushes over a submerged concrete slab and creates a permanent standing wave that has been surfed continuously since the 1970s. Local surfers lobbied for years to keep it, eventually winning official recognition. It is now a protected surf spot, which is a sentence that only makes sense in Munich.
In spring 2025, the wave temporarily disappeared when the city carried out maintenance on the channel bed. Then at Easter, for the first time in months, it came back. I happened to be there the day it returned. The queue of surfers on the bank was long. The energy was something I have rarely felt at any surf spot in the world, and I have been to a few.
I didn’t surf it. The Eisbach is fast, narrow and unforgiving. Local surfers train for years before attempting it and even then the consequences of a mistake are significant. What I did was stand on the bridge above and watch for about an hour, which turned out to be one of the more unexpectedly absorbing things I have done in Europe.
Surfers queue on the bank. When one falls or exits, the next drops in. No words. No signal. Just an understood order that everyone follows. The river is maybe four metres wide. There is no room for error and no room for ego.
The level is extraordinary. These are not beginners. They are surfers who have dedicated years to mastering a very specific, very demanding wave that happens to exist in a landlocked city. Some were doing cutbacks and noseriding. All of them made it look effortless in the way that things only look when they are not effortless at all.
Munich surprised me beyond the Eisbach. The English Garden is bigger than Central Park. The Chinese Tower beer garden in the English Garden is the place to be on a warm afternoon. Neuschwanstein is worth the day trip even if you have seen every photograph of it a hundred times. But the wave is the thing I keep coming back to.
