Tegernsee

The Tegernsee south of Munich is one of the most popular and fashionable pre-Alpine lakes in Bavaria. Well-kept lakeside resorts, the former monastery with the ducal brewery tavern and the local mountain Wallberg shape the region. Bathing, sailing, boat trips and hiking lie close together here.

Highlights

• Fashionable pre-Alpine lake near Munich
• Ducal brewery tavern in the monastery building
• Local mountain Wallberg with cable car
• Bathing, sailing and boat service

Good to know

Practical info

Background & History

The Tegernsee has always been considered one of the most beautiful lakes in Bavaria, framed by mountains of moderate height whose balanced proportions please the eye. The area owes its name to a Benedictine monastery founded in the 8th century, whose monks even gave later Munich its name, “bei den Mönchen” (by the monks). For centuries the healing calm of the lake attracted the highborn; in neighbouring Wildbad Kreuth Russian tsars and an Austrian emperor took the cure at the springs.

Yet the lake also bears a dark chapter. In the spa town of Bad Wiessee on the western shore, in the early morning hours of 30 June 1934, Hitler and his followers stormed a hotel and arrested the leadership of the SA, the prelude to the “Night of the Long Knives”, which plunged Germany definitively into dictatorship. Today this past lies beneath the peaceful surface of a lake whose water is among the purest bathing waters in Bavaria. The former monastery, one of the oldest in Bavaria, was for centuries a centre of learning and book art and later passed into a palace of the Wittelsbachs, which gives the lake its distinguished character to this day. The town of Tegernsee on the eastern shore cultivates, with its annual mountain film festival, the region’s romantic love of the mountains, a cheerful counterpoint to its dark history.