Kleinhesseloher See

This guide to Kleinhesseloher See in Munich starts on January 17, 1891, with a crowd pressed against the shoreline to watch the first ever German Speed Skating Championship staged on its frozen surface. It reaches back to park warden Josef Tax's beer stand beside a modest pond around 1800, the nobleman who had it expanded into a lake, and garden designer Friedrich Ludwig Sckell's work carving it into the island-studded shape you see today between 1807 and 1812. The Seehaus beside the water today is not Tax's wooden shack, nor even the elegant boathouse that stood there until 1970.