Landmarks & Sights

Sixteen places, one page each, ordered the way this site argues the city works: the 11 that cost nothing to enter first, the 5 you buy a ticket for after. That order is an argument, not a filing convention.

Photographs above, in order, from Wikimedia Commons: Johnny Silvercloud (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Bgag (CC0) · 螺钉 (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Basile Morin (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Stck w This photo was taken with Sharp Aquos R3 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Smiley.toerist (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Dwxn (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Richard Fisher from London, UK (CC BY 2.0) · Jinah78 (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Jjw (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Noh Mun Duek (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Craig Nagy (CC BY-SA 2.0) · No machine-readable author provided. IGEL assumed (based on copyright claims). (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Noh Mun Duek (CC BY-SA 4.0) · ddol-mang (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Jean & Nathalie (CC BY 2.0). Each sight page repeats its own credit beside the image.

Sixteen places, and eleven of them are free

That ratio is the honest summary of sightseeing in Seoul. The city wall costs nothing and has no opening hours. The great public spaces — Gwanghwamun Square, the Cheonggyecheon — cost nothing. The national museums cost nothing. The markets cost nothing to walk into.

What costs money is the modern machinery: the observation deck, the cable car up to it, the special exhibition inside the free museum. And the palaces, which charge about what a coffee costs.

Every sight here has its own page

Not a paragraph in a list — a page, with what it costs, when it is shut, how to get there, what to do in an hour, and what people get wrong. The closing days in particular are not consistent across the city and getting them wrong is the commonest wasted morning in Seoul.

The one thing to know before you go to any of them

⭐ Wearing hanbok gets you into every palace and into Jongmyo free. Rental shops cluster around Gyeongbokgung and Bukchon. It is a standing policy, not a promotion, and it is why the courtyards are full of people in Joseon dress.

How the city is laid out

The old capital sits in a bowl between four mountains, north of the Han river, and the wall runs over the ridges between them. Everything on this list except the National Museum and the Dongdaemun Design Plaza is inside or on that old boundary, which is why central Seoul is far more walkable than a city of nine and a half million has any right to be.

South of the river is Gangnam: newer, richer, on a grid, and almost entirely absent from this list, because what is worth seeing there is a way of life rather than a monument.