Seoul from the Clouds to the Carousel: A Day at Lotte World Tower and Seokchonhosu Lake

[mediK / HEALTH IN NEWS] If you want to see the Seoul of tomorrow today, head straight to Songpa-gu (송파구) in the city’s southeast corner. There, piercing the skyline like a glass needle, stands the Lotte World Tower (롯데월드타워)—at 555 meters and 123 stories, still the tallest building in South Korea and the sixth-tallest on earth. Completed in 2017, it didn’t just add height to the city; it rewrote the horizon.

At the very top sits Seoul Sky (서울스카이), the highest observatory in the country. Elevators whisk you upward in less than a minute to nearly 500 meters above street level, and when the doors open the view hits like a quiet thunderclap: the silver ribbon of the Han River, the endless quilt of high-rises, Namsan Tower looking suddenly modest, and on clear days the faint blue ridge of mountains far beyond the capital region. Step onto the transparent Sky Deck and feel the floor disappear beneath your feet; it’s the closest most of us will ever come to walking on air.

Come back down to earth—way down—and the same complex delivers an entirely different kind of thrill. Lotte World (롯데월드), Korea’s largest indoor theme park, spills across multiple floors and even outside under a soaring glass dome. Roller coasters whip past faux Egyptian pyramids, a nightly parade of floats and dancers lights up the indoor “streets,” and because almost everything is under cover, rain, heat, or snow never ruin the plan. Families pour in year-round, but the evening laser-and-fireworks spectacle is worth timing your visit around.



A two-minute walk from the tower’s base lies Seokchonhosu Lake (석촌호수), a serene man-made lake ringed by a perfect two-kilometer walking loop. Cafés and restaurants line the water’s edge, and the seasons write themselves across the surface: a tunnel of cherry blossoms in April that turns the lake pink, a golden corridor of ginkgo trees in November. On spring evenings, when the tower’s lights shimmer in the water and petals drift like slow snow, the scene feels almost too cinematic to be real.
In a single afternoon you can ride a coaster that dives through an indoor shopping mall, stand at the highest point in Korea watching sunset bleed across the metropolis, then stroll beneath cherry trees with a coffee in hand. Songpa-gu is Seoul’s sleek, vertical future and its gentlest, most romantic present occupying the same square kilometer—one of those rare places where the city lets you have it all.

Oh Ha Eun medi·K TEAM press@themedik.kr

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