Buam-dong, Seoul

Where it sits. Buam-dong lies outside the northern wall of the old capital, in a shallow bowl between Bugaksan, 342 metres, on the east and Inwangsan, 338 metres, on the west, within Jongno District. The way in from downtown is past Changuimun, the small north-western gate of the Seoul City Wall, universally known by its nickname Jahamun; a road tunnel of the same name burrows under the ridge alongside it and drops traffic toward Gyeongbokgung. Because the presidential compound sat immediately to the south-east for more than half a century, building heights were capped here and the valley never went high-rise. What remains is a pocket of two- and three-storey houses, walled gardens and workshop-sized cafés fifteen minutes by bus from one of the densest downtowns in Asia.

The gate and the wall. Changuimun went up with the rest of the city wall in 1396, and its present timber pavilion dates from a rebuild in 1741, which makes it the only one of the four minor gates to retain an original gatehouse. It carries an outsized share of Korean political history. In 1623 the conspirators of the Injo coup entered the capital through it, and on the night of 21 January 1968 a North Korean commando unit sent to attack the presidential residence was intercepted on the road just below; a roadside memorial marks the police commander killed there. The wall climbs sharply from the gate along the Baegak ridge toward Sukjeongmun, a stretch closed to civilians for decades after that raid and reopened only from 2007, at first with identity checks at both ends.

On screen. The staircase beside the mouth of the Jahamun tunnel is the one the Kim family run down in the rain in Parasite, in the long descent from the Parks' hillside villa to their own flooded street. Bong Joon-ho assembled that sequence from locations scattered across the city that are nowhere near each other in reality, and it ends on a purpose-built set inside a studio water tank in Goyang, so the descent is a piece of geography that exists only in the edit. Buam-dong's other screen credit is older and gentler: a hillside café on the road toward the Bugaksan Skyway stood in for the male lead's house in the 2007 drama Coffee Prince and has drawn visitors to its terrace ever since, mostly for the view back across the valley rather than the coffee.

What you actually see today. The Whanki Museum, opened in 1992 to a design by Kyu Sung Woo, holds the work of Kim Whanki, the painter who carried Korean abstraction to Paris and New York and died there in 1974; its stepped white galleries are worth the entry on their own. Seokpajeong, a nineteenth-century villa and garden linked to the regent Heungseon Daewongun, survives on the western slope inside the grounds of a privately run museum, complete with a pavilion built in a Chinese idiom rare in Korea. Between them sit small commercial galleries, secondhand bookshops, a couple of long-established dumpling restaurants near the gate, and lanes of stone retaining walls where persimmon trees hang over the pavement in October. The road that climbs east from the valley becomes the Bugaksan Skyway, a ridge drive laid out in 1968 in the immediate aftermath of the commando raid, partly as a security measure; the octagonal Palgakjeong pavilion at its high point gives the best free view over the northern half of the city and is worth the twenty-minute walk up from the last bus stop.

Walking from here. Three good routes start within a few hundred metres of the gate. The Baegak section of the city wall runs up to Malbawi and Sukjeongmun in about two kilometres of near-continuous stairs, with the whole downtown laid out behind you and the summit fenced against the presidential side. The Inwangsan path opposite is rockier and more open, passing shamanist shrines below Seonbawi. Over the ridge in Seochon lies Suseongdong Valley, the historical head of the Cheonggyecheon stream, which the city restored in 2012 after removing an apartment block that had covered it since the 1970s.

Getting there and timing. There is no subway station in the valley, which is a large part of why it feels the way it does. Green buses 1020, 7022 and 7212 run up from exit 3 of Gyeongbokgung Station in about ten minutes, and the walk over the hill through Changuimun takes twenty-five. Mid-October to early November is the best window, when the maples on Bugaksan turn and the light comes in low over Inwangsan in the late afternoon. Sundays are crowded and parking is close to impossible; weekday mornings are close to silent. Nearly everything involves a slope or steps, so wheeled access is patchy, and several of the cafés occupy converted houses with no lift.