Gyeonggi Province

We arrived at Suwon Station on a Saturday morning in late October, carried out of Seoul by a commuter train so packed with families and hiking gear that Lia and I pressed ourselves against the doors for forty minutes. By the time we emerged into the pale gold light of the Gyeonggi basin, I had already forgotten we were only an hour from the capital.

Hwaseong and the Weight of Walls

The fortress rises from the city in a way that makes no architectural sense to a French eye — it simply continues, stone rampart following stone rampart across rooftops and ridgelines, indifferent to the apartment blocks that have grown up around its base. Hwaseong was built in the 1790s under King Jeongjo, and the walls still carry that peculiar Joseon-era logic: defensive, ceremonial, and somehow intimate all at once.

I walked the full 5.7-kilometer circuit of the ramparts starting from Janganmun, the north gate, which faces a street market selling hotteok — thick sweet pancakes oozing brown sugar and cinnamon, fried on a cast-iron griddle right there on Jeongjo-ro. The smell follows you up the first climb. From the northeast watchtower, Banghwasuryujeong, the ginkgo trees below had gone the color of turmeric, and the city stretched out in every direction until it dissolved into autumn haze. I stayed there longer than I meant to.

The Royal Tombs at융릉 (Yungneung)

What surprised me — genuinely caught me off guard — was the silence at the Yungneung and Geonneung royal tombs, half an hour south of Suwon toward Hwaseong city. I had expected a tourist site. Instead I found a pine forest thick enough to muffle traffic entirely, a ceremonial path of worn stone slabs, and two burial mounds rising from the earth with the unhurried dignity of something that has been standing in one place for two hundred years. The tombs are the resting place of Crown Prince Sado and his wife — a figure whose story is one of the more tragic in the Joseon dynasty — and the place carries that history in its quiet.

Lia sat on a stone bench near the inner shrine enclosure and said it felt more like a park in the French sense — a designed landscape meant for contemplation — than anything she had expected in Korea.

We ate lunch afterward in the small town nearby: soondubu jjigae, soft tofu stew arriving at the table still boiling in its earthenware pot, the broth brick-red with gochugaru and smelling of anchovy and sesame.

When to go: Mid-October through early November for autumn foliage at both Hwaseong and the royal tombs. Spring cherry blossom season — late March to mid-April — is the only rival for the quality of light.