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Few cities carry the same productive tension as Seoul, where a royal palace sits in the shadow of glass towers and street food vendors set up beside Michelin-starred restaurants. The South Korean capital has been rebuilt, reinvented, and reimagined so many times across its six-hundred-year history as a capital city that restlessness feels almost constitutional here. What emerges from that restlessness is a place of genuine density, not just of population but of things to notice, to eat, to understand.

The old city organises itself around a series of landmarks that reward slow attention. Gyeongbokgung Palace, the largest of the five grand Joseon-era palaces, anchors the northern part of the centre, with the traditional hanok village of Bukchon spreading across the hillside to its east. South of the river, Gangnam represents the city's more recent ambitions, its wide boulevards and luxury retail a deliberate contrast to the narrower lanes of Insadong or the creative repurposing of Seongsu, a former industrial district that has become a focus for design studios and independent cafes. The Han River itself, broad and unhurried, threads through the city and gives Seoulites a rare piece of open, flat ground in a metropolis otherwise defined by hills.