Seoul’s Palaces, City Wall and Museums: A Day-by-Day Guide to Heritage and Art

Three days through Seoul's heritage and art: the city wall and palaces, the National Museum of Korea and Leeum, and the contemporary city.

Seoul rewards a visitor who looks at the line that once enclosed it. The city wall, the palaces inside it and the museums beyond them make a three-day route through five centuries of capital life, ending in the contemporary city.

Day one: the wall and the palaces

Begin with the Hanyangdoseong, the Seoul City Wall. Built in 1396 and about 18.6 kilometres long, it follows the ridges of four mountains, Baegak, Naksan, Namsan and Inwangsan, and is still preserved in the modern city. The walk over Inwangsan and Baegak is a good morning.

Changdeokgung, inscribed by UNESCO in 1997, was built as a secondary palace in the early fifteenth century and later served as the Joseon dynasty’s main seat for around 250 years. Its buildings follow the terrain and not a flat grid, and the rear garden, Biwon or the Secret Garden, has terraces, a lotus pool and pavilions among tens of thousands of trees. A stay at Four Seasons Hotel Seoul puts Gyeongbokgung, the main palace, within a short walk.

Day two: the national collection

The National Museum of Korea, in Yongsan, is one of the largest museums in the world by floor space, with more than 400,000 objects and around 12,000 on display, arranged chronologically from the Paleolithic to the modern age. Do not try to see everything. A fifth-century Silla gold crown from a Gyeongju tomb, the marble ten-storey pagoda from Gyeongcheonsa Temple and the gilt-bronze pensive bodhisattvas are the three places to start.

In the afternoon, the Leeum Museum of Art, run by the Samsung Foundation of Culture and completed in 2004, pairs traditional Korean art with modern and contemporary work. Its buildings are by Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas, so the architecture is part of the visit.