Where to go in Korea: choosing by how long you have and what you like

Almost every article answering this question hands you a ranked list of ten places. That is not much use, because the right answer changes completely depending on how many days you have and what you actually enjoy. A week and a fondness for mountains points somewhere entirely different from four days and an interest in food.

So the two questions worth settling first are how long you have, and whether you are here for cities, for landscape, for history, or for eating. Everything else follows from those.

The one piece of general advice that holds regardless: Korea is small enough that travel between regions is quick, and large enough that trying to see all of it in a week produces a trip spent mostly in transit. Two bases beat five.

Three or four days. Seoul, and only Seoul. It is large enough to fill the time without repetition, and a short trip fragmented across regions wastes half of itself on trains. Our three days in Seoul guide sets out a shape that groups the days by neighbourhood rather than by attraction, which is the difference between walking and commuting.

A week. Seoul plus one other place. Busan is the usual and the strongest choice — a coastal city that behaves nothing like the capital, about two and a half hours away by KTX. Jeju is the alternative if you want landscape over urban life, though it needs a flight and ideally a rental car.

Ten days to two weeks. Seoul, Busan, and something in between — Gyeongju is the obvious candidate and sits roughly an hour from Busan. This is the length at which the country starts to open up beyond the famous three.

Longer. At this point the interesting decisions are regional rather than city-based, and the guide to getting out of Seoul covers the mechanics of reaching places the KTX does not serve.

History. Gyeongju is unmatched — a thousand-year capital left as burial mounds and temples in open fields rather than built over. Seoul's palace quarter is the other pole, and a temple stay is the way to sleep inside the tradition rather than look at it.

Coast and islands. Busan for a city on the sea, and the wider coast and islands guide for what lies beyond it. Korea has thousands of islands and the ferry network reaches far more of them than visitors realise.

Mountains. The country is roughly seventy percent mountain and hiking is a national pastime rather than a specialist pursuit. The national parks guide covers which are worth the journey, and the hiking guide covers what a Korean trail is actually like.

Food. Regional cooking differs more than the export version of Korean food suggests, and eating in regional Korea is the guide for that. Traditional markets are where it is cheapest and most direct.

Festivals. These are scattered across small towns through the year and are the strongest single reason to be somewhere unfashionable. Our festival listings come from the tourism board's own data, and the guide to what Korean festivals are like explains what to expect once you arrive.

The commonest error is building an itinerary from a list of famous names and then discovering they are hours apart. Korea rewards depth over coverage: three days in one region will be remembered better than a day each in three.

The second is treating Seoul as the whole country. It holds about a fifth of the population and an outsized share of the attention, and the result is that genuinely good places two hours away are quiet on a weekday while the capital's landmarks are shoulder to shoulder.

The third is ignoring the season. Korea has four sharply distinct ones, and the same destination is a different trip in each — the when to visit guide covers the trade-offs, and the guide to cherry blossom and autumn timing explains why those two seasons cannot be booked precisely.

The country is divided into nine provinces and several metropolitan cities, and the provincial parts are where the difference between a Korea trip and a Seoul trip actually lies. Gangwon in the northeast is mountains and coast; the Jeolla provinces in the southwest have the strongest food reputation in the country; Gyeongsang in the southeast holds Gyeongju and Busan; Chungcheong in the middle is the least visited by foreigners and the easiest to reach.

Our explore section lists what the tourism board holds for every region, and the day trips guide covers what can be done and undone from Seoul in a single day if you would rather not move hotels.

For anything you reach by train or subway, the metro section maps every station in the six cities that have one, and will tell you what is within walking distance of the stop you arrive at.

If you want to see a place before deciding, the photographs section holds several thousand images from the tourism board's own photographers, searchable by place name — which is a better way to choose than any ranked list, including this one.