The story of Nymphenburg begins with a long-awaited child. The palace was founded as a summer residence to mark the birth of Max Emanuel, the heir to the throne, born in 1662 to the Bavarian Elector Ferdinand Maria and his wife Henriette Adelaide of Savoy after some ten years of marriage. Construction began in 1664 under the north Italian architect Agostino Barelli, best known in Munich as the designer of the Theatine Church. The original building was a single tall block in the Italian villa tradition, set in a modest walled garden and surrounded by a few service buildings and a court chapel, the whole standing well outside the city on land still entirely given over to fields. By 1679, this first incarnation was largely complete, and what is today one of Europe's largest palace complexes was still only a country house at the edge of the meadows.

The palace acquired its present scale under Max Emanuel himself, who reigned from 1680 to 1726. From 1701 onwards, the court architect Enrico Zuccalli added two offset pavilions to either side of the original block, linked to the central building by long galleries. When Max Emanuel returned to Munich in 1715 after years of exile during the Spanish War of Succession, he brought with him a generation of French and French-trained artists who reshaped the palace in the fashionable Parisian taste. Under the architect Joseph Effner and the garden designer Dominique Girard, the central pavilion was redesigned, the royal apartments were lavishly furnished, and the small geometrical garden was transformed into a full Baroque park with axial canals, parterres, fountains, and long perspectives. By the time Effner's plan was complete, the Bavarian court at Munich had become one of the leading artistic centres of early-eighteenth-century Europe.

Each generation of rulers left its mark. Karl Albrecht, who reigned as Elector of Bavaria from 1726 and later as Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII from 1742, added the magnificent crescent of buildings on the town side, intended to form the centre of an unrealised model city to be called Carlstadt. He also commissioned what is now considered Nymphenburg's most exquisite jewel, the Amalienburg, a small Rococo hunting lodge built between 1734 and 1739 by the Paris-trained architect François Cuvilliés the Elder. Its silver-and-blue Hall of Mirrors, executed by leading court artists and specialist workshops, is one of the most inventive small interiors of the Bavarian Rococo. Under Maximilian III Joseph, who reigned from 1745 to 1777, the Great Hall of the main palace received its opulent Rococo ceiling by Johann Baptist Zimmermann and Cuvilliés, the palace chapel was painted, and the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory moved into its present quarters at the front of the palace, where it has remained ever since.

The park itself was transformed once more in the early nineteenth century. Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, the leading German landscape architect of his era, gently reworked Effner and Girard's strict French gardens into a more naturalistic English landscape park, while keeping the long central canal and the formal Grand Parterre as the structural spine of the composition. The result is a remarkable hybrid: a Baroque axis that opens at its edges into winding paths, meadows, woodland, and quiet lakes. In 1792, under Elector Karl Theodor, the park was opened to the public, and it has remained freely accessible ever since. King Maximilian I Joseph, the first King of Bavaria, died at Nymphenburg in 1825, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the famous builder of Neuschwanstein, was born here on 25 August 1845, two facts that root the palace deeply in the family history of Bavaria's royal dynasty.

Inside the main palace, the visitor route passes through some of the most richly decorated rooms in Bavaria. The Great Hall, also known as the Stone Hall, soars through three storeys at the centre of the building, its vaulted ceiling covered in Zimmermann's airy frescoes. The south pavilion holds the famous Gallery of Beauties, commissioned by King Ludwig I in the nineteenth century, a series of thirty-six portraits of women from all walks of life painted by Joseph Karl Stieler, from princesses and noblewomen to the daughter of a Munich shoemaker. The state apartments preserve their original furniture, tapestries, and decorative schemes across multiple eras of taste, from late Baroque to early Neoclassical, and the Queen's Apartments retain the intimate atmosphere of a royal household that lived here continuously well into the twentieth century.

Beyond the palace itself, four small park palaces are scattered across the grounds, each one a complete miniature world in itself. The Amalienburg, set in a clearing on the south side of the park, is the most celebrated, with its silver-and-blue Hall of Mirrors and exquisite stucco work. The Badenburg, on the larger of the park's two lakes, holds one of the first heated indoor swimming pools in Europe, built for the elector in the early eighteenth century. The Pagodenburg, an octagonal pavilion inspired by the European fashion for Chinese design, was used as a place for refined retreats after games on the surrounding bowling green. The Magdalenenklause, deliberately built to look like a ruin, served as a place of contemplation for Max Emanuel and contains one of the most atmospheric grotto chapels in Bavaria. All four were conceived as part of a single artistic programme, and visiting them on foot through the park is one of the great pleasures of a full day at Nymphenburg.

The park's water features are essential to its character. A long central canal runs the full length of the formal garden, beginning at a great fountain in front of the palace and continuing through the Grand Parterre toward a distant cascade. During the summer season, from April to October, gondolas ply this central canal when the weather is fine, offering one of the most unexpectedly Venetian experiences anywhere in southern Germany. Two ornamental lakes flank the formal axis, the Großer See and the Kleiner See, both home to swans that have become a kind of unofficial emblem of the palace. On the edge of the park, near the courtyard of the main palace, the Marstallmuseum displays one of the world's finest collections of state carriages and sleighs, including the spectacular coronation coach of Emperor Charles VII, while the adjoining Museum of Nymphenburg Porcelain traces the long history of the manufactory whose work has been produced on this site since 1761.

München Hauptbahnhof is one of the largest railway stations in Germany and offers full bike infrastructure, including bike parking facilities and easy access to the city's cycle network. From the station, the most pleasant way to reach Nymphenburg is by bike, with a ride of around twenty to thirty minutes through the western districts of the city along largely flat, well-signposted streets. Cyclists who prefer not to ride through the city can take the tram line directly toward the palace gates, although bicycles are not always permitted on tram or S-Bahn services during peak hours. The park itself is largely a walking area, with cycling permitted only on designated paths and gravel roads on the outer sections, so most visitors leave their bicycles at the entrance and explore the grounds on foot. For onward travel, München Hauptbahnhof connects back toward Ingolstadt and the wider Danube region, so Nymphenburg works equally well as a day trip from the route or as part of a longer Munich stopover.