AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Seosomun Historical Park is a place where a painful past has been reshaped into a serene, modern public space in the heart of Seoul's Jung District. Once the official execution ground outside the Joseon dynasty's Small West Gate—and the site where countless Catholics were martyred from 1801 onward—the area today pairs a green, flower-filled park above ground with a striking memorial complex sunk into four basement levels below it.↗↗↗
Admission is free, the grounds are largely wheelchair accessible, and the park sits a short walk from Chungjeongno Station, making it an easy and rewarding stop for history-minded travelers, architecture lovers and anyone seeking a quiet pocket of green amid the city bustle.↗↗
A Garden Built Over History
Renovated and reopened in 2019, the park grew out of the older Seosomun Neighborhood Park into a vast cultural and memorial complex covering some 46,000 m² across four basement levels. The ground level is the part visitors first wander through: a landscaped garden arranged around a central plaza, planted with 45 different species of trees—including pine, oak and rose bushes—and roughly 100,000 stems of 33 kinds of grasses and reeds such as iris, pink mulley and silver grass. The designers deliberately turned the site into a 'healing' space, where soft greenery invites lingering rather than hurried sightseeing.