Two museums share a parking lot on Ganghwa Island, and a UNESCO World Heritage dolmen sits on the lawn between them. One 3,000-won ticket covers the island’s whole history — Mongol invasions, two Western fleets — plus a 14.5-meter sperm whale skeleton. What to see, and in what order.

A single valley in Hwasun holds seventy-odd stone Buddhas and twenty-odd pagodas, carved from rock quarried on the spot — and four excavations still can’t say who made them, or when, or why. Free to enter, on the UNESCO tentative list, and the ending of a famous Korean novel.

Naju has two railway stations nobody catches a train at any more — a 1956 country halt that freight trains still rumble past, and a river port terminus rebuilt as a park around the last locomotive to run there. Plus the inland lighthouse, the fermented skate street, and the third station where a nationwide movement began.

For 32 years this temple on the road to Jirisan charged hikers who never set foot in it. The toll booth is gone, the money that settled the fight built a lakeside forest trail, and what’s left is a 1,200-year-old temple with a pavilion on a stone arch and a gate whose calligraphy is said to hold water.

A giant rock in a mountain stream in Geochang carries four centuries of carved graffiti, a poem from Korea’s greatest Confucian scholar, a polite refusal from his rival, and the marks of two clans who spent generations arguing over who owned it. Free to enter, and you can swim.