A Great View of Seoul, if You Follow the Rules

But there are several things to keep in mind if you intend to take the Bukaksan Fortress Walk, a trek of 2.2 kilometers, or 1.4 miles, that was off limits to the public until 2007 and still has security restrictions.

A visitor’s pass must be worn at all times during the hike. To get one, a hiker must come to one of the two trail heads between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., present a passport or government-issued ID and complete a short form, which is available in English.

Once you are on the trail, which is closed Mondays, you can turn back but you cannot leave the path. Unarmed soldiers dressed in pea-colored windbreakers watch every hiker’s every move. The soldiers are respectful, offering directions, but they will intervene the moment a camera is turned in the wrong direction: toward the presidential office downhill.

On the north-facing side of the trail are a centuries-old granite fortress wall, part of a 21-kilometer enclosure that once protected central Seoul, and two modern steel fences topped with concertina wire. The trail side facing the presidential compound is lined with infrared sensors that would alert soldiers, heavily armed and waiting in out-of-sight bunkers around the hill, if they had to defend the presidential compound from intruders.

Such restrictions are part of the allure of the walk, which generally takes about two hours to complete and attracts about 400 people a day. On weekends the walk can get crowded, with as many as 2,000 hikers piling up on the narrow, steep path.

“It’s a curiosity that makes a Korean like me want to come here at least once in my lifetime,” Chung Song-un, 54, a first-time visitor, said as he stopped to catch a breath.

The capital city sprawled below the trail, which was lined with azaleas, forsythia and magnolia in bloom. The mountain is so close to the city center that one hiker could pinpoint his hotel.

Decades ago, Westerners flying into Korea likened the land beneath them to a sea in a gale: 70 percent of the territory was covered with mountains and, over the centuries, rocked by foreign invasions, wars, civil strife and political and economic upheavals.

Nearly every hill has a tale, most related to ancient invasions from Manchuria or from Japan, or to the Korean War of 1950-53.

Bukaksan, in particular, has its own rich history.

Taejo, founding king of the Yi Dynasty (1392-1910), chose Bukaksan as the guardian mountain of his new capital when he built a palace at its southern foot. The modern-day presidential compound is squeezed in between that palace and the mountain.

The steep, 342-meter, or 1,122-foot, peak was supposed to protect the capital from invaders from the north. But the city was sacked several times, most recently by North Koreans during the Korean War.

The granite fortress wall — first built in 1396 along the Bukaksan ridge, rebuilt 26 years later at a cost of 872 lives and mended numerous times since — looks like a patchwork today, a testament to the country’s tumultuous history and the evolution of wall-making techniques. A signpost says in Korean that the methods used to chip and stack blocks can help determine when portions of the wall were rebuilt.

“The wall doesn’t look too refined, but it bears the marks of our nation’s long history and culture,” said Cho Si-young of the Korea Cultural Heritage Foundation, which is in charge of maintaining the fortress.

Near the western trail head stands the statue of a police commander killed in action in 1968. At the time, 31 North Korean commandos crawled through the heavily guarded border 50 kilometers to the north and came within striking distance of the office of President Park Chung-hee. In skirmishes that raged for two weeks around Bukaksan and other craggy mountains in the region, all the intruders, except two, were killed.

One survivor is presumed to have returned to the North and another one, Kim Shin-jo, was captured, saying at a news conference: “We came to slit Park Chung-hee’s throat.”

A government sign near the statue reads: “We may open our heart but must keep our guard up.”