Beyond Munich: A Road Trip Through Southern Bavaria
Munich is only the beginning of one of my favorite kinds of trips, the sort where the drive itself becomes as interesting as any single stop. Southern Bavaria was built for this. Head south from the city and the land changes by increments: farmland gives way to lakes, then painted villages, then the Alps themselves. Along that route sit medieval towns, royal palaces, mountain resorts, Baroque churches, and some of Germany's most striking lakes.
One story ties much of it together. King Ludwig II, the so-called fairy tale king who built Neuschwanstein, reappears at three different points along the drive: Neuschwanstein itself, Linderhof, and Herrenchiemsee, three very different attempts to construct the worlds he imagined rather than live in the one he inherited. His father, Maximilian II, shows up earlier, in Munich and at Hohenschwangau. By the time the route reaches Salzburg, the Wittelsbachs are behind us entirely, and we have crossed into the world of Mozart.
The route: Munich to Füssen to Oberammergau and Linderhof to Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Tegernsee to Chiemsee to Berchtesgaden to Salzburg. Most driving days run two hours or less, which keeps the trip feeling like a vacation rather than a series of transfers.
Munich
Spend a few days in Munich before picking up the car. The city's recorded history dates to 1158, and its origins had nothing to do with palaces. Munich grew because of salt. Before refrigeration, salt preserved food, and whoever controlled the routes that carried it controlled real money. Henry the Lion redirected the salt trade across the Isar, and the settlement that grew up around that decision became Munich. By 1506 it was the capital of a unified Bavaria, and centuries of Wittelsbach rule filled it with churches, palaces, gardens, and art collections that still define the center of the city.
Walk through the Viktualienmarkt, visit the Residenz, and give real time to the museums. The Alte Pinakothek alone holds works by Dürer, Raphael, Leonardo, Rubens, and Rembrandt.
And do not skip the beer halls and beer gardens. Beer here is not a tourist prop; it is cultural history, codified across Bavaria in 1516 under the Reinheitsgebot purity law.
Where to stay: Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski Munich
King Maximilian II commissioned this hotel in 1858, on the boulevard that still bears his name, so that his capital would have a hotel grand enough for the international visitors arriving in it. It was built near the royal court and was, at the time, described as the city's noblest address.
There is also a small, useful coincidence for this particular trip: Maximilian II was Ludwig II's father. Before we spend the next ten days chasing the son's castles across Bavaria, we sleep in the hotel the father built.
Munich to Füssen
Drive time: about two hours.
The farther south you go, the more the Alps take over the horizon. Füssen is known today as the gateway to Neuschwanstein, but the town itself predates the castle by roughly two thousand years. The Romans passed through here along the Via Claudia Augusta, the road that connected northern Italy to the lands north of the Alps. Later, Füssen became a substantial medieval town, its old center still watched over by the Hohes Schloss, once the summer residence of the prince-bishops of Augsburg.
One detail about Füssen tends to get lost entirely under Neuschwanstein's shadow: the town was once an important center of lute and violin making, and the former Benedictine monastery of St. Mang now houses a museum devoted to that instrument-making history.
Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau
Before Ludwig II built anything, his father restored Hohenschwangau Castle nearby. Ludwig spent much of his childhood there, surrounded by murals of medieval German legend, and those stories shaped his imagination long before he had the money or the power to build his own.
When he became king, he built Neuschwanstein Castle on the mountain above that childhood home. It was never meant to be a real medieval castle. It was a nineteenth century fantasy of one, staged for a king who increasingly preferred the world in his head to the one waiting for him at court in Munich. Ludwig was also Richard Wagner's most devoted patron, and Neuschwanstein's interiors reference the same legends that inspired Wagner's operas. He built the castle as a private refuge. Today it is one of the most visited sites in Germany.
Where to stay: Hotel Das Rübezahl
I would stay in Schwangau rather than treat Neuschwanstein as a day trip from Munich. Hotel Das Rübezahl gives you the castles and the mountains without giving up a proper resort stay. Two nights is right here.
Füssen to Oberammergau and Linderhof
Drive time: about one hour.
Oberammergau is known for its Passion Play, a tradition that began during the Thirty Years' War. In 1633, with plague spreading across Europe, the villagers vowed that if they were spared further deaths, they would perform a play of Christ's Passion on a recurring basis. The first performance was staged in 1634, and the tradition has survived for centuries, now generally performed once every ten years.
You do not need to time a visit around the play to see what makes the town remarkable. Many of its houses are covered in Lüftlmalerei, elaborate frescoes that depict religious scenes, traditional Bavarian life, and fairy tales, including facades illustrating Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel.
Linderhof, Ludwig's Little Versailles
If Neuschwanstein is Ludwig's medieval fantasy, Linderhof is his French one. Ludwig was fascinated by Louis XIV and the absolute monarchy of Bourbon France, and Linderhof drew directly from Versailles, though at a far more intimate scale. It is also the only major palace Ludwig lived to see finished.
The interiors are unapologetically extravagant: mirrors, gilding, carved ornament, almost no bare surface left anywhere. Ludwig had a dining table built to descend through the floor so servants could set his meals below and send the table back up already laid, meaning he could dine without ever seeing the people serving him. Then there is the grotto, an artificial cave Ludwig had built so he could listen to Wagner performed beside an underground lake, complete with a shell-shaped boat and elaborate theatrical lighting. He was building immersive entertainment in the 1870s, decades before anyone had a word for it.
Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Bavarian Alps
Garmisch-Partenkirchen reads like one very long town name, but it used to be two separate towns. Garmisch and Partenkirchen stayed independent until 1935, when they were merged ahead of the 1936 Winter Olympics, and the differences between the two sides are still visible if you know to look. Partenkirchen is the older of the two, tracing back to a Roman settlement called Partanum that once sat along a route through the Alps.
The Zugspitze dominates the region at 2,962 meters, Germany's highest peak, and it is worth going up only on a clear day, since cloud cover here can erase the entire point of the trip. Beyond it, the Partnach Gorge and the smaller surrounding villages are worth a few unhurried days rather than a single afternoon.
Where to stay: Schloss Elmau
Schloss Elmau sits in a protected valley in the Bavarian Alps and has become one of Germany's most recognized luxury retreats. It has hosted the G7 summit twice, in 2015 and 2022, but what draws me back is its long relationship with music: concerts have been part of its identity for generations, alongside its spas, restaurants, and hiking. Give it two nights, three if you can spare them.
Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Tegernsee
Drive time: about ninety minutes.
The history of Lake Tegernsee begins with a Benedictine monastery founded on its shores in the eighth century. Tegernsee Abbey became a significant religious and cultural center, and the former monastery still sits prominently on the lakeshore. After secularization in the early nineteenth century, the complex eventually passed to the Bavarian royal family, and that royal patronage is what turned Tegernsee into a fashionable retreat for Munich's elite, drawn by the mountains, the clean air, and the lake itself. The appeal has not really changed.
Where to stay: Althoff Seehotel Überfahrt
I would stay at the Althoff Seehotel Überfahrt in Rottach-Egern, directly on the water. It is a true five-star resort with a serious spa and several restaurants, and it gives this stretch of the trip an entirely different rhythm from Munich or Füssen.
Tegernsee to Chiemsee
Drive time: about ninety minutes.
Chiemsee is Bavaria's largest lake, sometimes called the Bavarian Sea, and two of its islands are worth the crossing. Fraueninsel holds a Benedictine convent with roots more than a thousand years old, along with a small village that still feels genuinely removed from the mainland. Herreninsel is where Ludwig II returns, this time with an even more audacious project than Linderhof.
Herrenchiemsee
: Ludwig Builds Versailles
Ludwig bought Herreninsel in 1873 and began building Herrenchiemsee Palace in 1878 as a direct homage to Louis XIV, not a subtle echo of Versailles but an attempt to outdo it. The palace's Hall of Mirrors is longer than the one at Versailles, and Ludwig lit it with thousands of candles. He spent only a handful of days there in his lifetime. Construction stopped when he died in 1886, and parts of the unfinished building were later torn down.
Where to stay: Hotel Gut Ising
Chiemsee does not have the concentration of grand five-star hotels you find around Munich or Tegernsee, so I would not choose a hotel here on star rating alone. Hotel Gut Ising is a historic country estate near the lake, with a spa, a golf course, tennis, and equestrian facilities, and it reads as a proper Bavarian country stay rather than a compromise.
Chiemsee to Berchtesgaden
Drive time: about one hour.
Berchtesgaden may be the most dramatic stop on the entire route, set beneath the Watzmann massif near the Austrian border. Nearby, Königssee is a long, narrow lake carved by glaciers and enclosed by steep mountain walls, and electric passenger boats have operated on it for more than a century, in part to preserve the near total silence of the setting. The boat trip runs toward the pilgrimage church of St. Bartholomä, easy to recognize by its red onion domes.
Berchtesgaden also holds a much darker history. Hitler first came to the Obersalzberg above the town in the 1920s and later built his mountain residence, the Berghof, there, and other senior Nazi officials followed, turning the area into a second seat of government. The Kehlsteinhaus, known in English as the Eagle's Nest, was built high above the valley and given to Hitler for his fiftieth birthday. The Documentation Obersalzberg museum now examines that history directly, on the same mountainside where it happened. I think it belongs in this itinerary. Bavaria is not only castles, beer gardens, and lakes, and the contrast here is part of what makes the region worth understanding rather than just photographing.
Where to stay: Kempinski Hotel Berchtesgaden
I would stay at the Kempinski Hotel Berchtesgaden, high on the Obersalzberg, a modern five-star resort with sweeping views across the surrounding Alps. After several days steeped in history, this is one of those hotels where the view itself is the amenity. Two nights is enough.
And Then, Salzburg
Bavaria technically ends at Berchtesgaden, but Salzburg sits close enough across the Austrian border that finishing the trip anywhere else would be a mistake. The cultural logic holds too. For most of its history, Salzburg was not simply an Austrian provincial city but an independent ecclesiastical principality of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by prince-archbishops whose wealth built the Baroque city that still stands there. In 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in that city, grew up in it, worked briefly for the prince-archbishop's court, and eventually left for Vienna out of sheer frustration with court life.
Walk the Altstadt, visit Mozart's birthplace on Getreidegasse, see the Salzburg Cathedral, and take the funicular up to Hohensalzburg Fortress. Salzburg is also, inescapably, The Sound of Music—fans can visit key filming sites like Mirabell Gardens, Schloss Leopoldskron, and the gazebo at Hellbrunn Palace. While the film mattered far less in Austria than it did in America (itself a small lesson in how a place's story can look entirely different from the outside), wandering past these iconic backdrops adds another layer of charm to the city.
Where to stay: Hotel Sacher Salzburg
Finish at Hotel Sacher Salzburg, directly on the Salzach River across from the Old Town, a proper historic European grand hotel and exactly the kind of place I want at the end of a trip like this one. Order the Sacher-Torte. While invented at the family's flagship in Vienna, there is no better place in Salzburg to eat the original
How Long This Bavaria Road Trip Needs
I would plan ten to fourteen days, depending on how much time you want in Munich, in the Alps, and in Salzburg. A rough version might run three nights in Munich, two around Füssen, two or three at Schloss Elmau, two at Tegernsee, one or two around Chiemsee, two in Berchtesgaden, and two in Salzburg, which adds up to more than fourteen days if you take the maximum everywhere. That is exactly where the trip should be tailored to the traveler: someone drawn to Ludwig II and the palaces might linger longer around Füssen and Herrenchiemsee, while someone after hiking and quiet might move those extra nights to Schloss Elmau and Tegernsee instead.
By the end of it, you have followed a Roman road into the Alps, passed through a medieval trading town, slept inside the world the Wittelsbach kings built for themselves, stood inside all three of Ludwig II's unfinished obsessions, climbed Germany's highest mountain, crossed its largest Bavarian lake, sat with the region's darkest twentieth-century history, and arrived, finally, in the city where Mozart was born. Few journeys cover this much ground—or tell a story this rich—in so short a distance.
If a trip like this is the kind you want to take, Skylark Journeys is here to handle every detail. From securing exclusive partner perks at luxury hotels to coordinating rental cars, insurance, and custom scenic driving routes—or arranging a private driver if you would rather sit back and take in the views—we handle the logistics so you can focus on the experience. Reach out today to start mapping your dates.
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