Yeouido

Character

Yeouido Park preserves the shape of a runway. The long strip through the island began as aviation ground, became the enormous asphalt Yeouido Plaza in the 1970s, and was planted as a public park at the end of the 1990s. One piece of land records three different ideas of what modern Seoul needed

Around that strip, Yeouido was built as a purpose-planned political and economic center. The National Assembly anchors the western side, office towers and financial institutions concentrate around the central and eastern blocks, and apartment districts complete the island’s large-block urban structure

The river edge adds another layer of use. Yeouido Hangang Park draws office workers, picnickers and festival crowds to a waterfront that sits directly beside some of Korea’s most formal political and corporate architecture

The experience

Yeouido works as several adjacent city experiences, so the useful starting point depends on what you want to see. Yeouido Station serves the financial core and central park; National Assembly Station places you beside parliament and the western end; Yeouinaru Station opens directly onto the Hangang waterfront

The island’s scale is part of its character. Wide roads, large superblocks and separated institutional compounds make distances feel longer than in older central-Seoul neighborhoods. Yeouido Park provides a green north-south spine through that geometry, while the riverfront offers a second, more open public landscape

Walking the park gives the clearest physical clue to the island’s past. The former runway became a monumental plaza large enough for state ceremonies and mass gatherings, then Seoul removed the asphalt and opened the present park in 1999. The narrow linear form survived every change

History

Yeouido spent much of its earlier history as low, flood-prone Han River land. An airfield appeared here in 1916 and developed into Gyeongseong Airfield in the late 1920s. After liberation, the site continued in aviation and military use before the airbase closed in 1971

Seoul’s transformation of the island began in earnest in the late 1960s. City planners sought a new administrative and business center, and architect Kim Swoo-geun’s early schemes proposed an ambitious modernist city with layered circulation and symbolic public buildings. Political decisions, costs and changing planning teams altered much of that vision, but the resulting district retained large blocks, high-rise development and specialized institutional zones

The central runway became 5·16 Plaza, later Yeouido Plaza, a vast paved space designed for public ceremonies and emergency military use. The National Assembly building was completed in 1975. Its sheer scale also gave Seoul a place for mass civilian gathering

In 1983, KBS’s live “Finding Dispersed Families” broadcast transformed Yeouido Plaza and the area around the broadcaster into a national meeting ground for people searching for relatives lost through war and division. Posters spread across the KBS building, streets, plaza and even trees. More than 100,000 applications were submitted; 10,189 people found long-lost relatives during 138 days and 453 hours 45 minutes of broadcasting. The surviving broadcast archive entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2015

Yeouido Plaza later hosted major political rallies as well. Seoul began converting the asphalt expanse into a park in 1997; Yeouido Park opened in 1999

Before you go

Treat Yeouido as a district with three practical anchors. Use Yeouido Station for the financial core and central park, National Assembly Station for parliament and the western side, and Yeouinaru for the riverfront. Combining all three on foot is possible, but the superblocks make a focused half-day more satisfying than a checklist lap around the island