K-Hiking: Why Foreign Visitors Are Adding Mountain Trails to Their Korea Trips
Foreign visits to Korea's national parks were estimated at 2.05 million in 2025 — more than double the previous year's count, though the park service changed how it counts. Here's why Seoul's peaks became a destination, not a detour, and what changes if you want to try one yourself.
The Shift: Tourists Are Making Room for a Trailhead
Ask what a first trip to Korea looks like and the answer used to be predictable — a palace, a shopping district, a few plates of galbi. Korea Times reporting now describes foreign visitors increasingly trading palace visits and other well-known Seoul landmarks for mountain trails, and a Seoul city analysis calls hiking part of a broader diversification of where tourists go. Foreign visits to Korea's national parks were estimated at over 2 million in 2025, and one of the busiest mountains, Bukhansan, sits inside Seoul's own city limits.
Two Million Isn't One Crowd
The headline number needs a footnote before it means much of anything.
Korea's national parks recorded an estimated 2,050,897 foreign visits in 2025 — often described as "over 2 million foreign hikers," which overstates it: the figure counts foreigners present inside national park boundaries, coastal and marine parks included, not hikers specifically. Of that total, roughly 1.13 million were overseas tourists and roughly 920,000 were foreign nationals already living in Korea, heading to a national park on a weekend the same way a local resident would. Both groups are part of the same real trend; they're just not the same trip, and conflating them makes the tourist share look bigger than it is. One more footnote: the park service estimated the 2025 figure from mobile-roaming data, while 2024's 885,000 was counted by hand at park entrances, so the year-over-year jump is not a like-for-like comparison.
2,050,897
Estimated foreign visits to Korea's national parks in 2025 — about 1.13 million overseas tourists and about 920,000 Korea-resident foreigners (Korea National Park Service, via Korea Times, March 2026).
+131%
Reported growth over 2024's 885,000 foreign park visits (Korea JoongAng Daily, June 2026). Treat it as a rough sense of scale: 2024 was counted by hand and 2025 was estimated from roaming data (Munhwa Ilbo, March 2026).
~5%
Foreign nationals as a share of Korea's roughly 43.3 million total national park visits in 2025 — a small slice of the whole, about 4.7% (Korea National Park Service, via Munhwa Ilbo and Korea Times).
~55%
Share of foreign park visits made by short-term tourists rather than residents already living here (Korea National Park Service, via Hankook Ilbo, April 2026).
1Where They're Actually Going
- Hallasan, on Jeju Island, draws more foreign visitors than any other mountain park — over 300,000 a year.
- Seoraksan, on the east coast, is next at roughly 170,000.
- Bukhansan, sitting inside Seoul's own city limits, is close behind at roughly 135,000 — the only one of the three a visitor can reach without leaving the capital.
These per-mountain figures (Korea National Park Service, via Hankook Ilbo) include foreign residents as well as tourists. Counting overseas tourists alone, the park service put Hallasan at about 270,000, Seoraksan at about 110,000, and Bukhansan at about 50,000 — and Jeju's Hallasan and the coastal parks, not Seoul's peaks, topped that ranking (Seoul Economic Daily, March 2026).
The Difference Is the Subway, Not the Scenery
Korea isn't the only country with mountains. What visitors keep pointing to is how little effort it takes to reach one from a hotel room.
A 33-year-old tourist from Colombia put it simply, as Hankook Ilbo reported: in other countries you spend a lot of time and effort getting to a mountain, while in Korea a subway or bus gets you there easily. A 31-year-old visitor from France made the same comparison from the other direction, per Kyunghyang Shinmun: in Europe, hiking usually means leaving the city first, while in Seoul public transit reaches almost any trailhead on its own. A 31-year-old tourist from India said she wanted natural scenery rather than more of the places she had already been, like Namsan or the Han River, and joined a guided hike after watching a hiking video.
+9.2–12.1%
Range of 2025 growth in foreign-tourist foot traffic across 16 popular Seoul destinations, hiking mountains among them (Seoul AI Foundation analysis of mobile-phone data, released by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, July 2026).
270,623
Riders through six hiking-gateway subway stations on Saturday, April 11, 2026 — up 11.5% from the comparable Saturday a year earlier (Seoul Metro, via Seoul Economic Daily).
+21.9%
Year-over-year ridership growth at Achasan Station alone on that Saturday — the sharpest jump of the six (33,600 riders, up from 27,566).
The Trails Seeing It Firsthand
A Seoul city analysis of 2025 mobile-phone foot-traffic data (Seoul AI Foundation, released July 2026) counted average daily foreign tourists of 4,015 at Bukhansan, 2,169 at Bukaksan, 1,192 at Gwanaksan, and 729 at Achasan. That is a different method from the park service's roaming-data estimate, so the totals shouldn't be compared directly. Growth was strongest at the smaller, more residential peaks, not the famous one: Achasan up 11.8% and Gwanaksan up 10.0% over the year before. None of this is a foreign-visitor-only story, either — a 2026 survey of 1,000 Korean adults by research firm Embrain found 66.9% had hiked at least once in the past year, and about 40% of respondents in their 20s and 30s cited social-media "proof" culture as a reason they started.
2What Keeps Them Coming Back
- Davis Robin, a global content creator who posts about hiking in Korea, has pointed to small everyday touches as part of the appeal — exercise equipment set up right on the mountain, and older "aunts and uncles" he's never met who sometimes wave and say hello.
- A 29-year-old visitor from the US has described walking the fortress wall path on Bukaksan and watching the city suddenly open up below — nature and the skyline in the same view.
- A 28-year-old visitor from Japan has said clear courses and a steady flow of other hikers make the risk feel low, and that you can turn back midway according to your stamina — which she's called ideal for a solo traveler in their 20s or 30s.
- A 34-year-old visitor from Australia has said that renting the right shoes and having the course's difficulty explained in detail eased the burden of an unplanned hike during his trip.
The City-Run Help Most First-Timers Don't Know About
A lot of what makes these trails feel approachable isn't the mountain itself — it's a city-run desk at the bottom of it.
The Seoul Hiking Tourism Center, run by the Seoul Tourism Organization, opened its first branch at Bukhansan in 2022 and has since expanded to Bukaksan and Gwanaksan, renting out boots, poles and other gear, giving route advice, and — per Kyunghyang Shinmun — running free guided hiking programs. The gear rentals are for foreign tourists and the Koreans accompanying them, and they are not free: a May 2024 citizen-reporter article on Seoul city's Mediahub put them at 2,000–5,000 won per item, and the center's own site does not list a current price, so check before you go. It served 101,290 visitors in 2025, 18.5% of them foreign, and 98.31% of those foreign visitors said they were very satisfied. In March 2026 the Seoul Tourism Organization also ran a three-week "Seoul Hiking Week" of 12 guided sessions on Suraksan, Bukhansan, and Gwanaksan, which drew 323 foreign participants. For hikers who want the forest without a summit climb, Kyunghyang Shinmun also points to the Seoul Dulle-gil 2.0 route, a loop trail around the city that can be walked in sections over several days, with a stamp book.
The Honest Part: More Hikers Also Means More Accidents
None of the above is the whole picture. More people on a mountain, including more people hiking it for the first time, shows up in the injury numbers too.
Korea's national parks logged 123 incidents in 2025 — 10 deaths and 113 injuries — five more than the year before. An 11-year-old boy died in a fall at Juwangsan in May 2026. Over one Buddha's Birthday weekend at Seoraksan, two hikers fell (5 meters and 7 meters) and a third collapsed from cardiac arrest; when the park reopened after its spring closure, roughly 16,000 people walked the mountain that day, and rangers logged 22 cases of illegal or disorderly behavior — including entering unauthorized trails, bivouacking, and dumping trash — over that opening weekend (Korea JoongAng Daily, June 2026).
"We install safety facilities on trails, but a lot of people leave the trails and use unofficial paths instead," said Choi Seung-hwan, a spokesperson for Korea's national park service, who called leaving the trail the most common cause of injury or death. "It's the outdoors," he added, "we all know that there are safety risks." (Korea JoongAng Daily, June 2026)
⚠ None of this means these trails are unusually dangerous — it means more people, including more beginners, are on them than before. The most common cause of injury or death the park service cites: leaving the marked trail. Stay on it, even when an unofficial shortcut looks obvious.
If You Want to Try It
3Start From a Subway Exit, Not a Guidebook
- Seoul Metro treats Achasan, Dobongsan, and Suraksan stations (along with Gyeongbokgung, Yangjae, and Seoul National University stations) as hiking gateways, and Kyunghyang Shinmun reports that many Seoul trailheads are a 10–15 minute walk from a subway exit. Not every mountain works that way — Bukhansan is closer to an hour from central Seoul by bus, per Korea JoongAng Daily — so check the route before you set out.
4Borrow Gear Before You Buy It
- Seoul Hiking Tourism Center branches at Bukhansan, Bukaksan, and Gwanaksan rent boots and poles to foreign visitors (and Koreans accompanying them) for a small per-item fee (2,000–5,000 won in a May 2024 report; check the current price) and can explain a course's difficulty — worth doing before a summit attempt, not after one goes wrong.
5Stay on the Marked Path
- The park service says the most common cause of injury or death is hikers leaving the official trail for unofficial paths. The marked route can look like the longer option on a map — take it anyway.
Trail closures, weather and gear-rental prices change. Check the Korea National Park Service and the Seoul Hiking Tourism Center before you go, and hike within your own ability. This article is general information, not safety advice.
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