Karlsplatz/Stachus
You start on a square with two names. Officially it is Karlsplatz, but in Munich nearly everyone says Stachus, and the nickname is the older one. In the 18th century a house stood on the corner of Sonnenstraße and Bayerstraße, where the Kaufhof department store is today, and from 1710 the Föderl family poured beer there and in its garden. From 1728 the landlord was Mathias Eustachius Föderl, known as Eustach. His inn became the Stachus, the name outlived the family, and eventually it passed to the whole square.
Look at the gate with its two flanking towers that closes the square. It is the 15th-century outer gate of the Neuhauser Tor, first recorded in 1302 when Munich built its second wall. The road through it was the medieval salt road, which Duke Henry the Lion had diverted from Föhring to Munich. The city owed its very existence and its wealth to that salt.
The neo-Baroque crescent of buildings around you is the Stachus-Rondell, begun in 1899 to plans by Gabriel von Seidl and finished in 1901. When the lower levels were dug for the S-Bahn trunk line, workers found the foundations of a 15th-century round outwork in front of the gate. In 1791 Elector Karl Theodor gave Benjamin Thompson the authority to raze the later bastion here, and that was the beginning of Munich losing its walls. The square never got quiet again: in 2022 some 41,000 vehicles crossed it every day, so use the crossings.
Walk through the gate into the old town; after 720 m, about 9 minutes, you stand in front of the Frauenkirche.
