Seoul: K-pop, Joseon Palaces and the City That Never Stops Reinventing Itself

Complete Seoul 2026 guide: Gyeongbokgung, Bukchon, Myeongdong, Hongdae, Korean cuisine and K-pop. All the tips for your South Korea trip.

I went to Seoul to cover Seoul Fashion Week for a magazine. I arrived with three press accreditations, two suitcases of "work outfits" and the absolute conviction that I knew exactly what I was there for. Six hours after landing I had discovered that the best content wasn't inside the Dongdaemun Design Plaza but outside it, on the entrance steps, where the attendees were wearing the most extraordinary clothes I had seen in years — and that the 7-Eleven ramyeon at two in the morning was, without any doubt, the finest meal I had eaten in recent memory.

Seoul has that specific ability to make everything you brought planned from home feel less interesting than the first thing you find by accident. The fashion photographer climbing Bukchon Hanok Village at 6am to photograph the rooftops before tourists arrive. The Korean designer who had been waiting two hours in the Gyeongbokgung queue to do the guard change in a hanbok. The group of Hongdae university students who, while performing spontaneously in the street, managed to get forty strangers dancing without anyone asking.

Gyeongbokgung Palace is the reason Seoul justifies any long-haul flight even for someone with no prior interest in Korean history. The contrast between the curved roofs of 14th-century Joseon architecture and the Gangnam skyline behind it is the city's most honest image: old and new, not in competition but in permanent conversation. deciphers the guard-changing protocols and the history of the Joseon dynasty — which lasted five centuries, one of the most impressive records of institutional longevity in human history.

The Bukchon neighbourhood, ten minutes' walk from the palace, is the 14th-century Seoul that survived the 20th. The alleys between hanok with curved tile roofs exist five hundred metres from fifty-storey glass buildings, and the coexistence doesn't feel forced — it feels entirely natural, as if the city had decided that time doesn't need to choose between past and present but can contain both simultaneously.

In Myeongdong, K-beauty is not a trend. It is a design industry as serious as Italian fashion, with a consumer base that approaches its skincare routine with the same seriousness that other markets bring to gastronomy. The street food stalls sharing a block with the skincare shops serve tteokbokki (rice cakes in spicy sauce), hotteok (sugar and cinnamon pancakes) and kimbap that you eat standing up for under two euros. connects the best stalls with context about Korean cuisine that makes them twice as interesting.

Gwangjang Market has existed since 1905 and the interior of its corrugated metal pavilions smells of sesame oil, kimchi and batter frying in a way that activates hunger at any hour. The mayak gimbap — small rice rolls at twenty cents each — are the reason Seoul has a gastronomic reputation requiring no Michelin-starred restaurants to justify it. is, objectively, the finest way to spend fifteen euros in this city.

Hongdae at night is another country within the same one. The electronic music clubs — Cakeshop, Soap, Beton Brut — have the same curatorial seriousness as Berghain but with a door policy that essentially amounts to: if you pay, you're in. At 3am, the streets around the clubs are still a vintage clothing market lit by fluorescent lights and a row of food trucks serving dakgalbi until 5. The city that never sleeps is not a slogan — it is a literal description of what happens in Hongdae any given Friday.

For internet: is essential in South Korea, where 5G covers practically the entire territory and average download speeds are three times the European average. Seoul without internet is like Seoul without light — technically possible, but you're missing half the city.

For secure connections in hotels and cafés, is the logical complement to the eSIM — South Korea has some geographic content restrictions and the VPN is useful for European and American services. And although South Korea has an excellent healthcare system, travelling this far without international medical cover is an unnecessary risk: covers everything from day one.