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Country guide
Half of South Korea's 51 million people live in a single metropolitan area, and that shapes a visit more than the country's 100,472 square kilometres do. Seoul and the region around it hold the palaces, the museums and most of the reasons to come, and everywhere else is measured as a train ride out from it. Busan, at the far southeastern corner, is the coastal counterweight of beaches, a fish market and hills of stacked houses, while Gyeongju in between is the old Silla capital and is largely tombs and temples. The northern border is closed, so every route out of Seoul runs south.
Every city catalogued in this country so far, ranked by how much there is to see.
Photograph · 라성민 · CC BY-SA 3.0
Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.
Gyeongbokgung was the first royal palace of the Joseon dynasty, established in 1395 a year after Hanyang, now Seoul, was chosen as the capital.
Changdeokgung was raised in 1405 as a secondary palace to Gyeongbokgung, and the garden on the slope behind it was laid out the following year.
Jongmyo is the Confucian royal ancestral shrine of the Joseon dynasty, and it is a working ritual precinct rather than a temple or a palace.
Namsan Seoul Tower is a working broadcast mast with an observation deck bolted onto it, standing on the summit of Namsan, the wooded hill that sits in the middle of central Seoul.
Bukchon is a lived-in neighbourhood rather than a museum village, and every rule a visitor meets there follows from that one fact.
Cheonggyecheon is an 11-kilometre stream running through the middle of Seoul, sunk a storey below street level between Cheonggye Plaza and the Hangang River.
Deoksugung is the palace of the Korean Empire, and the Royal Palaces and Tombs Center's own history of it is unusually blunt about how it became one.
Gwangjang Market fills a block of Jongno-gu at 88 Changgyeonggung-ro, on the ground between Jongno 4-ga and Yeji-dong, and its merchants describe it as the first permanent market in Korea.
