Nami Island

Where it sits. Namiseom is a half-moon of wooded ground of roughly 460,000 square metres lying in the Bukhan River about sixty kilometres northeast of Seoul. Administratively it belongs to Chuncheon, though almost every visitor arrives from the opposite bank at Gapyeong, which is a five-minute ferry crossing away. It has not always been an island. When the Cheongpyeong Dam closed in 1944 the rising reservoir drowned the low farmland around a wooded rise and left the high ground standing in water, giving the place its flat interior and its improbably soft, shallow shoreline. A path runs about five kilometres around the rim; the middle is level enough that most people cross it three or four times in an afternoon without registering the distance.

Named for a general, planted by a banker. The island carries the name of Nam Yi, a Joseon general who suppressed rebellions in the 1460s and was executed for treason in 1468 at the age of twenty-seven on the word of a rival. A mound attributed to him sits among the trees near the centre, marked by a low stone. The landscape that draws the crowds, though, is barely sixty years old. In 1965 the businessman Minn Byoung-do bought what was then sandy farm ground and began planting it as a nursery: metasequoia, ginkgo, Korean pine, birch, cherry and tulip trees, set out in dead-straight nursery rows. Those rows are the whole visual signature of the place. The avenues photograph like cathedral naves because they were never designed as scenery at all.

On screen. Nami's international fame rests on twenty episodes of television broadcast by KBS between January and March 2002. Winter Sonata, directed by Yoon Seok-ho and starring Bae Yong-joon and Choi Ji-woo, used the island's tree avenues for its most repeated images: the couple walking the Korean pine lane in falling snow, the snowman scene, the row of bare metasequoias receding into grey. NHK bought the series and aired it in Japan from 2003 as Fuyu no Sonata, where it became a genuine cultural event and sent tens of thousands of Japanese viewers, many of them women in their forties and fifties, to Gapyeong. A bronze of the two leads and a much-photographed bench now stand near the avenue, and the island's operators have never stopped leaning on the association. The drama is routinely cited as the first mass export of the Korean Wave to Japan, and Namiseom is the place that boom is anchored to.

The Naminara Republic. In 2006 the island's management declared Namiseom the "Naminara Republic", a piece of tourism theatre complete with a flag, its own stamps, a passport and an admission ticket printed as a visa. Behind the whimsy sits a fairly serious cultural programme: the island runs a picture-book library, hosts the Nami Concours international illustration competition, and has built its identity around children's literature and recycled-material art rather than rides. Sculpture appears along the paths, much of it made from bottles, bricks and salvaged timber, and a small pottery and glass studio operates near the eastern shore.

What is actually there. Ferries leave the Gapyeong wharf from early morning until evening, every ten to thirty minutes depending on season and crowd. The adventurous alternative is the zip wire, which drops 940 metres from an eighty-metre tower on the mainland bank straight onto the island. Once across, the ground is gravel and grass: bicycle rental, a small train shuttle, ostriches and rabbits in enclosures, squirrels and chipmunks that have long since lost their fear of people. Food runs from riverside barbecue to instant noodles, there is one hotel for overnight guests, and the whole island empties dramatically after the last ferries take the day crowd back.

• The Korean pine avenue and the metasequoia lane, both filmed for Winter Sonata
• The ginkgo avenue, which peaks gold in the last days of October
• Nam Yi's grave mound in the interior woodland
• The riverside rim path, with the Bukhan River ridges closing the view on all sides

Getting there and timing. The ITX-Cheongchun service from Yongsan or Cheongnyangni reaches Gapyeong Station in a little over an hour, and a shuttle or taxi covers the last ten minutes to the wharf. The Gapyeong tour bus loops on from here to Petite France and the Garden of Morning Calm, which is how most day-trippers string the area together. Autumn colour and fresh spring green are the two peaks; deep winter delivers the snow that the drama made famous, at the cost of a bitter wind off the water. Paths are flat and mostly firm, and the ferry loads over a ramp, but gravel surfaces and the crossing itself make independent wheelchair travel awkward. Weekday mornings before the first coach groups are worth the early start.