Explore Seoul in Google Street View

Seoul is the one major city where Google's mapping has been genuinely constrained by law, and it is worth understanding before you explore. For years South Korea refused to let foreign companies export detailed map data to overseas servers, citing security concerns about North Korea, which is why Google Maps here has long lacked full walking and driving directions. In February 2026 the government approved an export of high-precision data on conditions including security safeguards and the blurring of military and other sensitive sites. Street View itself exists and is usable; it is the surrounding map that has been the unusual part.

The city has been destroyed and rebuilt more thoroughly than almost any capital of its size. Seoul was a Joseon dynasty capital from 1394, was flattened during the Korean War, and was then rebuilt at extraordinary speed from the 1960s onward. What that produces on screen is abrupt: a fifteenth-century palace gate with a wall of towers directly behind it, and no transitional century in between.

Gyeongbokgung is the place to start because it makes the layering obvious. The palace was burned, rebuilt, then largely demolished during the Japanese occupation and has been under reconstruction since 1990, with buildings still being added back from historical records. Standing at Gwanghwamun looking north you get the gate, the palace behind it, and Bugaksan mountain closing the view, which is the axis the whole original city was laid out along.

Bukchon Hanok Village sits between two palaces and is the largest surviving cluster of traditional hanok houses in the city. The lanes are steep and narrow and a lot of them were captured on foot. It is residential, which is worth remembering: people live in these houses, the district has signage asking visitors to be quiet, and the imagery shows an ordinary neighbourhood rather than a preserved site.

The Cheonggyecheon is the piece of Seoul most worth seeing at ground level. It is a stream that runs east-west through the centre, which was covered over with concrete in the 1950s and then had an elevated motorway built on top of it. In 2003 the city demolished the motorway and uncovered the stream, and the result is a sunken linear park eleven kilometres long, several metres below street level, with the traffic overhead and out of sight. It was captured on foot and it is a completely different city down there.

For the modern city, the Gangnam side of the river is the obvious stop but Dongdaemun is more interesting. The Design Plaza there, finished in 2014, is a vast curved aluminium shape with no straight lines and no obvious front, dropped into a district of wholesale fabric markets that still trade through the night. The contrast between the two, three minutes apart on foot, is Seoul's whole argument with itself in one place.