We stood outside the gates of Yongma Land for a good ten minutes convinced we’d wasted the last two hours trying to get to that spot where we were standing.
There was nobody there at the entrance gate. No queue, no ticket seller, no sign of anyone willing to open the gates and let us in. There was just a little window that was closed, a gate, and the sound of cats somewhere behind the buildings, doing that thing cats do where you can’t tell if they’re playing or killing one another.
It was the last week of June, it was extremely hot and humid, and we’d just come across the entire city to get here.
Carlo went for a wander around the side to see if there was another way in. I stayed at the window hovering, hoping someone would appear to let us in as the thought of trespassing was getting more and more real.
And then – like a vision – a woman appeared from around the back of one of the buildings, walked over without a word, and slid the window open.
We handed her ten thousand won (about six euro) each and she gave us two bottles of water and told us to go through the gate.
We were in.
Abandoned Theme Park Seoul
If you’ve never heard of Yongma Land, here’s the short version.
It opened in the early eighties out in Mangu-dong, in the east of Seoul, at the foot of Yongmasan mountain. It was a small family park that had the usual carousel, bumper cars, an octopus ride, a pirate ship, and a little rollercoaster.
Back then, I’d imagine it was the sort of place you’d go and talk about the visit for weeks afterwards. I’d imagine it was bright, colourful, and full of life. I’d imagine it was the place that kids begged to go to once they got their summer holidays from school.
Then Lotte World happened, and Everland happened, and suddenly a small neighbourhood park in the east of the city was competing with places that had big investors and huge budgets.
The crowds left in their droves and chose to enjoy all that those big budgets brought – new rides, more space, bigger thrills. Yongma Land limped on for years and then closed for good in 2011.
What makes it worth writing about is what happened next, which is nothing.
Nobody knocked it down. Nobody cleared it out. The owners kept the land, and eventually opened the gates back up, not as a working park but as somewhere you can walk around and take photos. Somewhere you can visit and see what happens when a theme park is literally frozen in time.
The park has now become one of the most photographed abandoned places in all of South Korea. Music videos, film crews, and K-pop shoots have all been shot in the park. There are even two or three little photo studios on the site now, and this is how the owners of the park manage to make money and keep the park open for visitors.
The magic is that nothing has been moved and nothing has been fixed, and that’s what makes this place so unique.
Yongma Park: What is it like today?
The first thing you notice when you get inside the gates is how quiet it is. Not peaceful quiet. The other kind where you keep expecting to hear something. The eerie kind of quiet.
We met an English guy as soon as we passed the gates. He was a photographer and had been there a couple of hours already and he was loving exploring with his camera in hand. We ended up chatting to him for the guts of forty minutes. He has an Instagram page and – like us – he loves to visit abandoned places. He gave us a proper rundown of where to go and what to point the camera at. Then he went off to do his thing and we went off to do ours.
And that was it. We met nobody else for the next two hours.
We walked the whole park and here’s what we saw…
Bumper cars sitting in rows with the grass coming up through the floor. An octopus ride with its arms still out. Faded murals of Michael Jackson. A carousel that looked like it was built for a horror movie set. A submarine simulation ride, and behind it a set of concrete stairs going straight down into pitch black.
We shone a phone torch down there and could see a couple of steps into a much bigger room. Neither of us said the word “rats” out loud but we were both thinking it, and we were too scared to go any further (if you do visit the park and you’re braver than us, bring a head torch and let us know what’s down there!!).
The ride that stood out the most for me was the rollercoaster.
The track is still up, rusted and buckled, and there’s a car sitting right at the top. Not at the bottom where you’d park it. It is sitting exactly where it was when somebody switched the power off in 2011 and never switched it back on.
Fifteen years. Rain, snow, summers like the one we were standing in and it hasn’t moved.
I don’t know why that one stood out more than the others, but it did. It’s the difference between a place that closed down and a place that was literally stopped in its tracks.
It literally represents a place that was frozen in time.
The carousel is the other one that stood out.
Every old theme park had one. The horses, the mirrors, the painted panels around the top, the whole thing going round slowly while parents stood at the rail waving on every lap. You barely see carousels anymore. Everything has got to go upside down now. Everything has to be complicated.
Standing in front of a silent one, with the grass grown up around the base and the paint coming off the horses, I thought about the kids who queued for it. The birthday parties. The screeching. The absolute roars of laughter that would have come from that one ride of a Sunday afternoon here in 1987.
That’s the thing that keeps pulling us back to places like this.
We did Chernobyl in 2019 and something about it stuck with both of us. Carlo loves photographing somewhere that was full of people and then wasn’t. You get a better sense of how people actually lived from old abandoned places than you do from most museums.
The Best Abandoned Site To Visit In Seoul
About an hour before we left, somebody shouted at us.
We were up on one of the rides at the time, and I thought, right, that’s us caught…we can’t be up here.
I looked around and it was a man down at the centre of the park, waving us over. We got down off the ride and went over to him and it turned out that he wasn’t giving out to us at all. He just wanted to take a few photos of us. I think he could have been the husband of the woman at the ticket counter.
There had been rain earlier in the day and there was a big puddle on the ground. He got us positioned around it and shot the reflection.
He took a couple of cringy photos (he even made me twirl around and around to the point I got dizzy!), and he then waved us off to keep exploring. He didn’t want anything for it and he was just a really kind man that wanted to send us home with some nice photos of us together.
Not long after, a group of girls arrived in full princess dresses. Enormous purple and yellow gowns, the whole Disney thing, with a photographer trailing after them. They went straight for the carousel and got stuck in blowing bubbles and creating a wind for hair movement with big fans.
It was entertaining to watch from a distance, and I wondered what they’d end up doing with those photos.
Would they print them off and put them on a wall? Would they get a big reaction from their friends when they post them on social media? The dresses were certainly big enough to get attention.
Yongma Land: Is it worth visiting?
Yes, it certainly is.
We left around half six and the rain started just as we walked out the gate, which felt like perfect timing.
There is an argument online that Yongma Land isn’t really abandoned, because you pay in and somebody’s minding it. I’ve seen people call it a scam when we were doing our research before visiting.
I’d say this after visiting.
Structurally, nothing has changed since the day it shut. The rides are where they were. The rollercoaster car is where it was. It’s frozen in time, and that’s what we came for.
But the fact that we had the whole place to ourselves for a couple of hours made all the difference. If we’d walked in on a Saturday afternoon with four photo shoots going and speakers blaring and a queue for the carousel, we’d have had a completely different day and I’d be writing a completely different post.
So if the empty, eerie version is what you want, your timing matters when visiting.
Visiting Yongma Land: The Practical Bits
How to Get to Yongma Land
We were staying near Doksan station, so it was a fair trek to get to the park. Line 1 to Hoegi, change onto the Gyeongui-Jungang Line, and go out to Mangu. It took an hour and a half, including wait times for the connecting trains.
From Mangu station, the walk to the park is uphill, and in that humidity we weren’t walking it so we got an Uber from the station. It only took about ten minutes, and cost about three Euro. We were dropped right at the entrance to the park and we did the exact same in reverse going home.
A few things to keep in mind if you’re visiting:
There are no toilets so go before you leave the station, and pace yourself on the water.
There’s no shop either so bring a snack if you’re planning to stay a few hours.
Wear long trousers if you plan to go into the overgrown areas.
It’s cash only and bring the right amount.
The opening hours are loose. Most sites say it’s open from 10 to 6, but it varies, and the park can be shut altogether if there’s a shoot on.
Lastly, hope for a cloudy day! We got thick grey humid cloud cover with no blue sky at all and it was perfect. Every photo came out better for it. We felt like a bright sunny day would flatten the eerie vibe of the park.
Would we go back? Probably not.
And I don’t mean that badly – it’s simply because we did it and we loved it. We got what we came for and we got to tick visiting an abandoned theme park in Seoul off our bucket list!
There aren’t many places like this left anywhere, never mind sitting at the end of a metro line in a capital city. If you’re in Seoul and you’ve done the palaces and Myeongdong and you fancy an afternoon that’s interesting and a bit off the beaten path, put this on your list.
And if you find out what’s down those stairs, tell us!!