  The Munich Near-IR Cluster Survey (MUNICS) is a wide-area, medium-deep,
photometric survey selected in the K' band. It covers an area of roughly one
square degree in the K' and J near-IR pass-bands. The survey area consists of
16 6' x 6' fields targeted at QSOs with redshifts 0.5 < z < 2 and 7 28' x 13'
stripes targeted at `random' high Galactic latitude fields. Ten of the QSO
fields were additionally imaged in R and I, and 0.6 square degrees of the
randomly selected fields were also imaged in the V, R, and I bands. The
resulting object catalogues were strictly selected in K', having a limiting
magnitude (50 per cent completeness) of K' ~ 19.5 mag and J ~ 21 mag,
sufficiently deep to detect passively evolving systems up to a redshift of z ~
1.5 and luminosity of 0.5 L*. The optical data reach a depth of roughly R ~
23.5 mag. The project's main scientific aims are the identification of galaxy
clusters at redshifts around unity and the selection of a large sample of field
early-type galaxies at 0 < z < 1.5 for evolutionary studies. In this paper -
the first in a series - we describe the survey's concept, the selection of the
survey fields, the near-IR and optical imaging and data reduction, object
extraction, and the construction of photometric catalogues. Finally, we show
the J-K' vs. K' colour-magnitude diagramme and the R-J vs. J-K', V-I vs. J-K',
and V-I vs. V-R colour-colour diagrammes for MUNICS objects, together with
stellar population-synthesis models for different star-formation histories, and
conclude that the data set presented is suitable for extracting a catalogue of
massive field galaxies in the redshift range 0.5 < z < 1.5 for evolutionary
studies and follow-up observations.
