Ihwa Mural Village

Where it sits. Ihwa Mural Village covers the western slope of Naksan, a modest granite hill of about 125 metres that forms the eastern of the four guardian peaks around old Seoul. The Seoul City Wall runs along the ridge above it, and the neighbourhood tips downhill from that wall toward Dongdaemun, a warren of narrow stepped alleys, retaining walls and small houses packed shoulder to shoulder. Ihwa-dong belongs to Jongno District, ten minutes on foot from the theatres of Daehangno. The gradient is the defining fact: almost every lane is either a staircase or a ramp steep enough to make delivery scooters whine.

A moon village. Korean has a term for settlements like this — daldongne, moon village, so called because they sit high enough to be close to the moon and were built by people with no claim to flatter ground. Ihwa took its present form in the 1950s and 1960s, when war refugees and rural migrants put up small houses on public land on the hillside, often overnight. For decades it was poor, overlooked and slated in various plans for clearance. Some of the original single-storey houses, with their low gates and tiny yards, are still occupied by the families who built them, which is the source of both the neighbourhood's atmosphere and its friction with visitors.

The project that changed it. In 2006 the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ran a public art programme here, generally called the Naksan Project, bringing in around seventy artists to paint murals, install sculpture and treat the staircases as canvases. It was one of the first large Korean experiments in using art to regenerate a declining neighbourhood rather than demolish it, and it worked far better than anyone intended. Photographs of the painted stairs circulated online; then variety television arrived, above all the KBS travel programme 2 Days & 1 Night, whose cast climbed these steps and put the village in front of a national audience. Within a few years the lanes were carrying thousands of visitors a day.

On screen and the backlash. The consequences are now a standard case study in Korean debates about screen and social-media tourism. Two of the most famous works — a staircase painted with flowers and another with a shoal of carp swimming up the steps — were painted over in grey in April 2016 by residents who had lost patience with the noise, the litter, the tripods and the strangers photographing through their windows at night. The act was widely reported and widely argued about, and it left the village with a mixture of surviving murals, blank patches and later work. Films and dramas still use the alleys as shorthand for hillside Seoul, and the neighbourhood continues to appear in music videos, but the etiquette is now explicit: quiet voices, no flash into houses, and nothing after dark.

What is actually there. Murals remain scattered across the lanes — a pair of wings painted on a wall for photographs, fish and flowers on doors and gateposts, sculptures tucked into corners — and finding them is a matter of wandering rather than following a route. The reward at the top is the view: from the wall path and Naksan Park the city runs away westward, with Dongdaemun Design Plaza's steel curves in the middle distance and Namsan Tower on the far ridge, and the illuminated city wall behind. A handful of small cafés occupy converted houses, several with rooftop terraces facing the sunset. Below the hill, Daehangno holds well over a hundred small theatres, the densest concentration of live performance in Korea, and the two neighbourhoods are usually walked together.

• The surviving murals and painted gateposts along the upper alleys
• The wall path and Naksan Park viewpoint over the western city
• The Seoul City Wall walk from Hyehwamun down to Dongdaemun
• The blank stairs where the flower and carp murals were removed in 2016

Getting there and timing. Hyehwa Station on Line 4, exit 2, leaves a ten-minute uphill walk through Daehangno to the base of the hill; the climb from there is steep and the last stretch is stairs. There is no admission and nothing is gated. Late afternoon into sunset gives the best light for both the murals and the view, and spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons on a slope that bakes in August. The village is genuinely unsuitable for wheelchairs, pushchairs or anyone unsteady on steps, and the alternative for the view alone is to approach Naksan Park by road from the north, where the gradients are gentler. Residents are living their ordinary lives a metre away from the visitor route, and the village works best when that is treated as the governing fact.