Seoul's 5 Royal Palaces and Historic Residences to Visit in 2026

Seoul’s Palaces Are Having a Record 2026

Seoul’s royal palaces just posted their best first half on record. Gyeongbokgung, Changdeokgung, Changgyeonggung, and Deoksugung — the four state-run palaces — plus Jongmyo Shrine drew a combined 7.41 million visitors in the first half of 2026, up 6.6% from about 6.95 million over the same period in 2025, according to Korea Heritage Service data reported by The Korea Herald. Foreign nationals accounted for roughly 2.27 million of those visits — about 30.6% — with Gyeongbokgung alone drawing 1.63 million international visitors, more than any other site.

If you’re planning a Seoul trip this year, that’s the headline worth knowing before you book: these aren’t quiet historical sites anymore, they’re some of the most-visited attractions in the country, and timing your visit matters as much as choosing which one to see.

This guide covers five places. Four are the state-run palaces counted in that visitor data — Gyeongbokgung, Changdeokgung, Deoksugung, and Changgyeonggung. The fifth, Unhyeongung, is technically a royal residence rather than a palace, smaller in scale and outside the official palace visitor count, but arguably more personal: it’s where a future king actually grew up.

Gyeongbokgung Palace

Gyeongbokgung is the palace most first-time visitors default to, and the numbers back that instinct up. It was the single most-visited site in the first half of 2026, with about 3.65 million total visitors — up 10.7% from roughly 3.29 million in the first half of 2025 — according to Korea Heritage Service data. It also pulled in more foreign visitors than any other palace, at 1.63 million.

Practical: given those crowd numbers, this is the palace to see early in the morning or plan around — it’s the biggest draw for a reason (scale, the throne hall, the mountain backdrop), but it’s also the one where you’ll be sharing the view with the most people.

Changdeokgung Palace and Secret Garden

Changdeokgung has the deeper backstory of the group. It was established in 1405, under King Taejong, as a secondary palace built after Gyeongbokgung — making it the second royal palace of the Joseon dynasty — and it’s been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, per UNESCO’s listing and Korea Heritage Service records.

Analysis: what makes Changdeokgung worth the separate trip from Gyeongbokgung isn’t just the history — it’s the layout. Where Gyeongbokgung is built on a formal, symmetrical axis, Changdeokgung follows the natural contours of the land, and that difference culminates in Huwon, its rear garden, often called the Secret Garden.

It’s the part of the palace where architecture gives way to landscape — pavilions, ponds, and old trees arranged to be walked through rather than viewed head-on. If Gyeongbokgung is the palace you photograph, Changdeokgung is the one you walk slowly.

Deoksugung Palace and Seokjojeon Hall

Deoksugung is the palace for anyone who wants to see where Korean and Western architecture actually collided. Its Seokjojeon Hall, a Western neoclassical stone building completed in 1910, spent 2009 through 2014 under restoration and reopened on October 13, 2014 as the Daehan Empire History Museum, according to the Cultural Heritage Administration and Time Out Seoul. The museum now holds exhibits on the Korean Empire period, 1897 to 1910, and the imperial family who lived through it.

Analysis: for a US visitor, the closest comparison is walking from the White House straight into a wing built like the U.S. Capitol — Seokjojeon’s Greco-Roman columns sit a few hundred feet from hanok-style halls with curved tile roofs, and the contrast is the point. It’s a physical record of Korea’s attempt, at the end of the 19th century, to present itself as a modern empire on equal footing with Western powers, in the same architectural language those powers used.

Changgyeonggung Palace

Changgyeonggung is one of the four palaces folded into that record first-half visitor count, but it doesn’t get the same crowds or the same headlines as Gyeongbokgung or Changdeokgung next door.

Analysis: that’s arguably the best argument for putting it on your itinerary. If Gyeongbokgung is where you go for scale and Changdeokgung is where you go for the garden, Changgyeonggung is where you go when you want a palace without the tour groups — it sits right beside Changdeokgung, so pairing the two in a single afternoon costs you almost no extra travel time.

Unhyeongung Royal Residence

Unhyeongung isn’t a palace in the official sense, but it might be the most personally significant address on this list. It was the residence of the Heungseon Daewongun and the childhood home of King Gojong, and it’s where Gojong married Empress Myeongseong, later known as Queen Min, on March 21, 1866.

Today, Unhyeongung runs a traditional wedding ceremony program in partnership with the Seoul Metropolitan Government, styled on noble-class wedding customs roughly a century old. It’s worth being precise about what that program actually is, because it’s easy to assume it’s a free public reenactment: it isn’t. It runs on weekends from April through November, excluding July and August, it’s reservation-based, and it’s paid — packages start at around 1.1 million won for the basic option, according to the Seoul Metropolitan Government and Mediahub Seoul.

Practical: if you want to see it, book ahead and check the seasonal calendar before you build a trip around it — it’s not running in midsummer, and it’s not a drop-in event.

Wear Hanbok for Free Palace Admission

Here’s the detail that actually changes how you should plan a palace visit: wearing a hanbok, Korea’s traditional dress, gets you free admission to the palaces. It’s not a niche loophole — it’s become one of the most-used programs in Korean heritage tourism. Annual hanbok free-admission visitor counts have grown from roughly 300,000 to 400,000 shortly after the program launched in October 2013, to about 540,000 in 2022, to more than 2 million — about 2.07 million — in 2025, according to the Korea Heritage Service, Korea’s public data portal, and Hankook Ilbo.

Rental shops cluster around Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung specifically because of this — you rent a hanbok for a few hours, wear it into the palace, and skip the admission fee entirely.

Analysis: the closest US equivalent isn’t really a museum discount — it’s closer to how the National Park Service waives entrance fees on specific days each year, except here the qualifying condition isn’t the calendar, it’s what you’re wearing. For a family of four visiting two or three palaces, renting hanbok for an afternoon can pay for itself in waived admission alone, on top of being the photo you’ll actually want from the trip.

Given that growth curve, expect the hanbok crowds at Gyeongbokgung’s main gate to keep growing through 2026 — plan your visit for opening hour if you want the courtyard photo without a few hundred other people in matching rented outfits.