Everything south of the river that the rest of the world thinks of as Seoul, and the part of Seoul that most rewards lowered expectations. Gangnam-gu is a business and luxury-retail district laid out in the 1970s on farmland, at car scale, on a grid of eight-lane roads — it has the country's densest concentration of Michelin stars, its best cocktail bars and its most expensive shops, and almost none of what makes a city pleasant to walk. Jamsil, across in Songpa-gu, is the family half: the tallest building in Korea, a lake ringed with cherry trees, a theme park and a very large park built on a 1,700-year-old fortress. The good things here are real but they are scattered, and they are separated by distances you will not want to walk.
Who it's for: People who want the food and the drinks: this is where Korea's only three-star restaurant is, where most of its two-stars are, and where the second-best bar in Asia sits on the same short street as a bar that has made the Asia list ten years running. Families, who get Lotte World, Seoul Sky, an aquarium and a lake within one station. Anyone travelling in the first week of April, when Seokchon Lake under blossom with a 555-metre tower behind it is one of the best sights in the country. Anyone who wants to understand what Seoul actually is now rather than what it was — this is where the money and the population went.