Surf’s down! Munich, till now an inland browsing hotspot, has misplaced its greatest wave

MUNICH — “It was gnarly. Dangerous. Only the most experienced could surf it,” says Jakob Netzer of what native surfers have come to name the “E1,” an ever-churning wave alongside a mountain stream that flows by way of central Munich — a swell that non-surfers and vacationers know because the Eisbachwelle or “ice stream wave.” 

“And it’s very sad the wave is not working,” says Netzer, watching the place the wave as soon as frequently appeared, just under a bridge that marks the doorway to the town’s English Backyard.

In early November, as metropolis engineers completed dredging the underside of the Eisbach — a two-kilometer-long (1.2-mile) canal that could be a aspect arm of the Isar River — they opened the floodgates to search out the Eisbachwelle, usually a 1.5-meter (4.9 ft) excessive summit of icy river water, had remodeled right into a small, nondescript whitewater bump alongside a raging waterway.

“It’s usually three sections,” says Netzer, who has surfed the Eisbachwelle for years. The wave stretches throughout all three. “On the far side, you jump in and there are these bumps, and then in the middle, you have a nice, smoother place where you can surf, but it’s not easy, because you have to anticipate the sections and know where to make the turns.”

The well-known Eisbach wave (Eisbachwelle) seems flattened within the English Backyard in Munich, Nov. 4. The Eisbach wave, beloved by surfers worldwide, has vanished following river cleansing operations, authorities introduced on Nov. 4, pledging full efforts to revive it.

Michaela Stache/AFP by way of Getty Photographs

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Michaela Stache/AFP by way of Getty Photographs

Netzer remembers the primary time he surfed the wave, on the age of 17. “I was working in a bar and one of my bar colleagues took me to go on the Wave in the middle of the night after our shift ended,” he remembers. “I actually didn’t think much about it, I just did it.”

It was the start of a browsing dependancy, says Netzer. He is frequently surfed each E1 and its much less difficult sibling E2, additional downstream, ever since — come rain, shine, or snow, when he dons his full-body wetsuit.

Fellow surfer Alexander Neumann of the Munich River Surfers’ Affiliation says over time, the town’s engineers have routinely dredged the Eisbach canal — however they did so with higher scrutiny this yr as a result of drowning loss of life of a surfer on the Eisbachwelle final April.

4 males wait with surfboards on the Eisbach wave in Munich’s English Backyard, Oct. 7, 2025.

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Malin Wunderlich/image alliance by way of Getty Picture

“They wanted to find if there are any danger zones where people could get stuck,” he explains. “So they took a bit too much out, which used to still lay on the ground of the wave, and the wave is not forming properly now.”

In response to questions on how the town of Munich is addressing the disappearance of the Eisbachwelle, spokesperson Susanne Mühlbauer issued an announcement to NPR: “For Munich, the Eisbach wave is a symbol of urban sports and leisure culture, as well as a globally unique and popular tourist attraction that complements and rounds off the city’s range of sights in an outstanding way — and that’s why Munich Tourism hopes the Eisbach wave will return quickly.”

Surfer Alexander Neumann of the Munich River Surfers’ Affiliation says over time the town’s engineers have routinely dredged the Eisbach canal, however they did so with higher scrutiny this yr as a result of drowning loss of life of a surfer on the Eisbachwelle final April. “They wanted to find if there are any danger zones where people could get stuck,” he says, “So they took a bit too much out, which used to still lay on the ground of the wave, and the wave is not forming properly now.”

Rob Schmitz/NPR

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Rob Schmitz/NPR

Down the road from the place the Eisbachwelle used to exist, on the Technical College of Munich, hydrology professor Markus Disse opens up a textbook to a chapter on hydraulic jumps, a hydrological phenomenon that happens alongside a fast-moving waterway just like the Eisbach, which creates a surfable wave. Disse says a wave just like the Eisbachwelle requires a sure water pace mixed with a “bump” of sediment on the underside of the stream.

Disse says he thinks the town seemingly eliminated that underwater bump. “They did their job too good,” he says, smiling.

Find out how to resurrect the Eisbachwelle? “I would play around with the discharge,” says Disse. “Perhaps they should try lowering the discharge, wait half an hour, then you see the effect, and you could do a series of experiments.”

Disse says if that does not work, then Munich authorities ought to try and dump gravel into the canal to re-create the “bump” of sediment that seemingly created the wave within the first place.

Again on the banks of the Eisbach Canal, Neumann watches an engineering crew from Hamburg — employed by the town of Munich to check why the wave disappeared and in command of bringing it again — fasten GPS and sonar tools to a boogie board earlier than they let it go into the river to check water circulate and graph the underwater construction of the riverbed.

Surfer Jakob Netzer stands in entrance of the Eisbachwelle, a preferred river browsing spot on the Eisbach canal in central Munich. In early November after metropolis officers dredged the canal, the wave disappeared, and the town and the native browsing group have teamed as much as attempt to carry it again.

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Rob Schmitz/NPR

He says he trusts that the town has the surfers’ finest pursuits in thoughts. Browsing alongside this stretch of the canal — which was owned till 2010 by the state of Bavaria — was unlawful till the town stepped in and initiated a land swap with Bavaria as a way to legalize browsing alongside the Eisbachwelle.

The town’s tourism board contains the location in its advertising, and Neumann says the Eisbachwelle has turn out to be an integral a part of the town.

Nonetheless, surfers have turn out to be impatient with the tempo of the work to resurrect the wave. Per week after it disappeared, Neumann says, a bunch of surfers submerged a wood ramp the place the wave as soon as stood, and for a day, the wave got here again. Nonetheless, authorities deemed the ramp an unlawful construction and eliminated it. The town continues to work on an answer.

Esme Nicholson contributed to this report from Berlin.