A light decoration in a tunnel in Seoul, South Korea (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
A huge underground space has been opened to visitors for the first time in the capital of South Korea
Last week, the local administration in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, opened to the public a huge underground space of around 3,000 square meters that had previously always been inaccessible: the space is located about 13 meters below Seoul Plaza, the most beautiful square in the world. famous place in Seoul. It is unknown why it was built, whether as an underground bunker or as a space to connect the nearby City Hall and Eulljiro 1-ga subway stations, as suspected by the city administration.
Tourist tours of the area are organized every weekend until September 23rd: four per day, each lasting about an hour and in groups of 10 people. The place is quite impressive: you enter a disused games room through a small door at the back, it is completely dark and you need flashlights to illuminate it. Long stalactites hang from the ceiling and you’ll wear a dust mask, hard hat and protective shoe covers during the tour. In the background you can hear the roar and vibration of Line 2, the subway, which runs even deeper underground (the space lies between the subway tunnel and the square).
The guided tours of the area beneath Seoul Plaza are the latest in a series of similar initiatives that the local government has launched in recent years to enhance the numerous underground spaces: in some cases, abandoned or never-used subway Stations, in others underground bunkers were built as a refuge in times of conflict. In still other cases, such as the space under Seoul Plaza, these are spaces whose history and origin are not exactly known.
The tours organized in the underground space are a temporary initiative: the local administration of Seoul intends to transform the vast area into a more structured and defined attraction and, for this purpose, has also organized a competition where participants can submit suggestions in this form of images or short videos. The most convincing projects are awarded prizes and the authors are granted funding for their implementation. It is not clear how many projects will be awarded and what types of proposals have been submitted so far. Seoul administration officials told the Korean newspaper Korea Economic Daily that one idea is to convert the area into some sort of recreational space.
Among the underground spaces that the Seoul administration has recently opened to the public is an abandoned train station dug beneath Sinseol-dong Station: The space, which opened to the public in 2017, was built in 1974 as an underground Railway platform was built, but was never used as the network construction plans had changed during construction. It has remained closed since then. Interest in this area has also been aroused by some films and music videos for which the abandoned space was chosen as a setting due to its suggestive appearance: in particular the 2013 film Cold Eyes and some videos of the K-groups – Pop, the South Korean Music and cultural phenomenon that became known worldwide in the 2000s.
A bunker in the basement of a bus stop in the Yeouido financial district, also in Seoul, has also been open to the public for several years. The 800 square meter area was discovered in 2005 during construction work at the train station: utensils and structures for everyday use such as sofas and bathrooms were found inside. According to the local administration, it was built in 1977 amid a series of high tensions with North Korea. The space was converted into an art gallery of the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA).
Subsequently, another bunker was opened to the public in the Jongno district, which was probably built during the Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945: in this case the room was kept as a museum of the colonial era, except for the rooms intact and the objects in it, with Lights and sounds that recreate the atmosphere of that time, such as sirens that warned of bombings and the sounds of air raids. Before it became a museum, the space was used for school visits. Among the underground spaces yet to be converted are at least four more, all near subway stations.
Continue with the post