Namsan Seoul Tower

Where it sits. The tower stands on the summit of Namsan, the 270-metre hill that sits in the middle of Seoul and separates the old walled city to the north from Yongsan and the Han River to the south. The structure is 236 metres tall, which puts its top around 480 metres above sea level and makes it visible from most of the central districts — a fact that Korean television relies on so heavily that the silhouette functions as a caption. It goes by several names at once: Namsan Seoul Tower to the city government, YTN Seoul Tower to its owner, N Seoul Tower on the tickets for the observation decks, and simply Namsan Tower to almost everyone who lives here.

The story behind it. It was built between 1969 and 1971 as Korea's first integrated broadcast tower, replacing a scatter of separate transmitter masts, and it opened to the public in 1980. A refurbishment completed in 2005 added the LED lighting scheme, the rebranded observation floors and the restaurants, and the tower has since acquired a civic side job: its illumination is used as an air-quality signal, turning blue on days when fine-dust readings are good, which means Seoulites read the skyline for a weather forecast. Four observation levels sit at the top, one of them a slowly revolving restaurant, and the windows are marked with the direction and distance to cities around the world.

The hill underneath. Namsan carries more history than the tower does. The summit holds a reconstructed set of beacon mounds, the southern terminus of the Joseon relay system by which fire and smoke signals from the frontier reached the capital in a matter of hours; the present mounds were rebuilt in 1993. The southern section of the fourteenth-century Seoul City Wall runs across the hill and can be walked. From 1925 to 1945 the northern slope carried the Chōsen Shrine, the principal Shinto shrine of the colonial period, removed after liberation; the Ahn Jung-geun Memorial Hall now stands on the approach, commemorating the man who shot Ito Hirobumi in 1909. Lower down on the north side stood the headquarters of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, which is why, for a generation of Koreans, the single word Namsan meant something other than a park.

On screen. The tower is the standard romantic climax of Korean television. The 2005 drama My Name Is Kim Sam-soon is generally credited with starting the fashion for leaving padlocks on the terrace fences, a practice that has since produced walls, trees and entire steel frames of locks weighing several tonnes, cleared periodically by the operators. It reappears in Boys Over Flowers, in Goblin and in a long list of others, and the cable car ride up is itself a recurring scene. Roughly speaking, if a Korean drama needs to say that two characters have arrived somewhere emotionally, it sends them up this hill.

What you actually see today. The plaza at the base is free and open, with the lock terraces, a stage, food outlets and the beacon mounds a short walk away; only the observation decks are ticketed. On a clear day the view runs from Bukhansan's granite ridges in the north, across the whole grid of the old city and the palaces, to the Han River bridges and the towers of Gangnam and Jamsil in the south-east, with Incheon and the Yellow Sea haze on the western horizon. Autumn gives the sharpest air; summer often reduces the view to a few kilometres. The hill itself is worth more time than the tower gets: a network of shaded paths circles the summit through pine and oak, the Namsan Botanical Garden and the Namsangol Hanok Village sit on the northern flank, and the wall path south drops toward the old Hoehyeon quarter in about forty minutes of easy downhill walking.

Getting there and timing. Four approaches. The Namsan cable car, running from Hoehyeon near Myeongdong since 1962, is the classic and the busiest, now fed by a public inclined elevator from the Myeongdong side. The Namsan circular shuttle buses, numbered 01 to 04, run to the plaza from Chungmuro, Seoul Station and Itaewon. Walking up from Namsan Park through the wall path takes forty to sixty minutes on a good gradient. Driving to the summit is not possible for private cars. Arrive about an hour before sunset for the light and stay for the city coming on, accepting that this is when the queues are longest — mid-morning is far quieter and the view is often clearer. Lifts serve the observation decks and the cable car station, but the plaza involves slopes and steps and the walking routes are not step-free.