A country · 321 places · 14 regions
South Korea, all of it.
321 curated places across 14 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
The 4 biggest regions — Busan, Jeju Province, Gangwon Province and Gyeonggi Province — read below as chapters, with 10 more waiting past them.
Chapter I · Busan · 28 places
Busan
Bukchon fills the slope between two royal palaces in the historic core of Seoul: Gyeongbokgung to the west, Changdeokgung to the east, with the ground rising north toward Bugaksan and falling south to the Jongno thoroughfare. The name simply means north village, north being relative to the Cheonggyecheon stream that divided the Joseon capital socially as well as physically. The area covers the neighbourhoods of Gahoe-dong, Gye-dong, Jae-dong and Wonseo-dong, and something in the order of nine hundred hanok — tile-roofed timber courtyard houses — remain within it, the densest surviving concentration in the city. Older and younger than it looks. During the Joseon dynasty this was the address of the yangban aristocracy, close enough to both palaces for officials to walk to work, and the plots were large: single families held compounds with servants' quarters and gardens. The streetscape visitors photograph today is not that city. It dates mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, when developers, most famously Jeong Se-gwon, bought up the aristocratic lots as the old order collapsed under colonial rule and subdivided them into rows of small, standardised urban hanok for a rising middle class. These houses compressed the traditional courtyard plan onto plots of a few dozen square metres, used glass in the sliding doors and mass-produced tiles on the roofs, and were built quickly and speculatively. The result is a modern housing estate in traditional dress, and understanding that makes the tight, repetitive rhythm of the lanes legible. On screen. Bukchon has been filmed constantly, and one work takes its name from the place: Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives, released in 2011, carries the Korean title Bukchon banghyang, meaning in the direction of Bukchon, and its black-and-white circling of the same streets, bars and coincidences is the most precise portrait of the quarter on film. Television has been busier. MBC's 2010 romantic drama Personal Taste used the hanok Sangojae in Bukchon as the house shared by its leads, and the building — an unusually large courtyard house with a walled garden — became a fixture of drama tours. Just above the village in Gye-dong stands Jungang High School, whose 1930s brick buildings appeared in KBS's Winter Sonata in 2002; Japanese visitors were still photographing its gate a decade later. The lanes also serve constantly as generic period or upmarket-Seoul backdrops in productions that never name them. What is actually there. The single most photographed spot is the steep run of Bukchon-ro 11-gil, where the lane climbs between walls and the tiled roofs step downhill in overlapping ranks toward the towers of central Seoul and Namsan beyond. Jongno district has designated eight official viewpoints across the area, which is a polite way of steering crowds. Between them sit small specialised museums and workshops — traditional knot-making, folk painting, embroidery, tea — and the Baek In-je House, a large 1913 hanok now open as a museum and one of the few places where the interior plan can actually be walked. Cafés and craft shops occupy converted houses along the main lanes, while the side alleys remain ordinary residential streets with cars, laundry and delivery scooters. A number of houses take paying guests as hanok stays, which is the only way to experience the plan as it was meant to work: rooms opening onto a courtyard, paper-screened doors, and a heated ondol floor warm enough to sleep on in February. People live here. The village's success has been hard on its residents, and the district has responded with a special management approach: posted visiting hours on the busiest lanes, stewards asking for quiet, restrictions on tour coaches, and multilingual signs pointing out that the doors are private front doors. The etiquette is simple — voices down, no entering courtyards, no tripods blocking the lane, and nothing at all before mid-morning or after early evening. The Bukchon Traditional Culture Center, in a restored hanok on the main lane, is the sanctioned place to see how the joinery, the roof structure and the underfloor heating actually work, and it runs short craft sessions for visitors. Getting there and timing. Anguk Station on Line 3 sits at the foot of the village; exits 2 and 3 both lead into it within a few minutes' walk. There is no admission, and the area connects on foot to Gyeongbokgung, Changdeokgung, Insadong and Samcheong-dong, so most visits fold into a wider day. Hanbok rental shops cluster near the station because wearing hanbok waives the palace entrance fees, which is why the lanes fill with costume by late morning. Spring and autumn give the best light on the roof tiles; early morning gives the streets almost empty. The lanes are steep, narrow, and paved in stone with frequent steps, and they are genuinely difficult for wheelchair users or anyone with limited mobility.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Jeju Province · 20 places
Jeju Province
A UNESCO World Natural Heritage tuff cone that erupted from the sea approximately 100,000 years ago, Seongsan Ilchulbong — literally 'Sunrise Peak' — rises 182 metres from the eastern tip of Jeju Island. Its crater rim, lined with 99 rock pinnacles, frames a broad green bowl at the summit. The climb takes roughly 30 minutes and rewards with wide coastal views that are best in the orange light of early morning.
✦ Sunrise year-round; spring for green meadows, winter for clear air · $
Chapter III · Gangwon Province · 18 places
Gangwon Province
The most dramatic of Korea's mountain parks, Seoraksan occupies the northern Taebaek range and is defined by granite spires, deep gorges, and broadleaf forests that turn vivid red and orange each autumn. The Ulsanbawi rock formation — a cluster of six granite pillars accessible via a steep 1.5-kilometre staircase — is one of the park's most photographed subjects. Buddhist temples, including Sinheungsa, sit at the mountain's base.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · Gyeonggi Province · 13 places
Gyeonggi Province
A late-eighteenth-century fortress wall encircling the old center of Suwon, complete with gates, command posts, and floodgates over a stream. Visitors can walk long stretches of the ramparts between restored towers.
✦ April to October · $
Regions of South Korea
Every place in South Korea
