Five days in Munich: Bavaria first, Germany a distant second

Arrive and go straight to the middle. The neo-Gothic town hall took from 1867 to 1909 to build and looks four hundred years older than it is, and its Glockenspiel performs at eleven, at midday, and again at five between spring and autumn: jousting knights, coopers dancing, about fifteen minutes of it, with several hundred people in the square looking up.

For the view, climb the church next door rather than paying for the town hall lift. Alter Peter is Munich's oldest parish church, rebuilt after the city fire of 1327, and its tower is 306 steps of narrowing staircase with the Alps on the horizon on a clear day. The stairs are one-way in places and there is no lift, which is exactly why the view is uncrowded.

Walk south through the food market for half an hour, then east to the Platzl for the evening. The Hofbrauhaus has been on this corner since 1644, holds well over a thousand people downstairs, and is entirely full of visitors, which does not stop it being a good time. If you want the local version, the Augustiner halls on Neuhauser Strasse are five minutes away.

The Wittelsbachs ran Bavaria for seven hundred years and the Residenz is what that looks like from the inside: a palace that swallowed a whole block of the old town, wrecked in the war and painstakingly put back. The museum and the treasury are separately ticketed and you do not need both. Take the museum for the Antiquarium, a barrel-vaulted banqueting hall of the 1570s lined with antique busts, which is worth the entry on its own.

Come out onto Odeonsplatz and cross to the Theatinerkirche, an Italian high baroque church in bright yellow, built in thanks for the birth of an heir in 1662 and looking as though it was delivered from Sicily by mistake. It is free and takes ten minutes.

In the afternoon walk north west into the museum quarter. The Alte Pinakothek was built by Ludwig I to display his collection in public, which was a novel idea at the time, and it holds the largest gathering of Rubens anywhere plus Durer, Altdorfer and a formidable run of early Netherlandish painting. Two hours, and the cafe in the basement is good.

The first camp opened in March 1933, weeks after the Nazis took power, in a disused munitions factory outside a quiet Bavarian town. It ran for twelve years, it was the model the others were built from, and nearly 43,000 people are known to have died in it. The memorial has been here since 1965 and it does not soften anything: the roll-call square, the reconstructed barracks, the bunker where prisoners were held in isolation, the crematorium at the far end of the site.

Go in the morning, allow four hours, and take the audio guide. It is free to enter. Children under about twelve get very little from it and it is not a place to rush.

Then come back and spend the rest of the day outdoors, which is what people who live here do. At the southern tip of the English Garden the Eisbach drops over a weir and forms a standing wave that surfers queue on the bank to ride, one at a time, in wetsuits, all year round. Walk up through the park from there to the wooden pagoda and its beer garden, and let the afternoon go.

Tram 17 runs west to Nymphenburg in about twenty minutes and puts you at the end of a canal with the palace across the water. It started as a modest pavilion in the 1660s and grew for a century in both directions, and the state rooms include Ludwig I's gallery of beauties, three dozen portraits of women he admired, commissioned regardless of rank. The park behind it is free and enormous, with a rococo hunting lodge in the trees that is a better building than the palace.

Back in town, stop at the Asamkirche on Sendlinger Strasse on the way south. Two brothers built it between 1733 and 1746 as their own private church, wedged into a plot barely eight metres wide between houses, and the inside is late baroque at its most uncontrolled: gold, stucco, twisted columns and a ceiling that does not know when to stop. Ten minutes, free, and easy to walk past.

The afternoon goes to the Deutsches Museum on its island in the Isar, the largest science and technology collection in the world and a place where the mining tunnels, the ship hall and the aircraft could each take an afternoon. It has been rebuilt in stages, so some galleries are always closed; pick three themes at the entrance and ignore the rest.

Finish at the church on the skyline. The Frauenkirche went up in brick between 1469 and 1488 because there was no good building stone nearby, and the twin towers were topped with copper onion domes in 1525 when the money for proper spires ran out. They stand a shade under 99 metres, which turned out to matter: a referendum in 2004 fixed that as the height limit for the old town, so nothing in central Munich looks down on it.

The inside is plain, tall and white, rebuilt after the war with the medieval fittings that survived. Look for the black footprint set in the floor by the door, which the story says the devil left when he came to inspect the building. Then the S-Bahn from Marienplatz runs to the Hauptbahnhof in three minutes and to the airport in forty.