If you say “DMZ”, most Europeans picture a very serious place: soldiers with dark sunglasses, loud headlines about missile tests and a line on the map you only see on the news.
When I finally travelled to South Korea last spring, what I found was more complicated than that – still tense, yes, but also strangely quiet, green and, in some moments, unexpectedly beautiful.

I’m an architect, so my obsession started with a picture, of course.
One day I saw a satellite image of the Korean Peninsula with a thin green band cutting across it. I zoomed in and read that this narrow strip of land has been mostly off-limits to civilians for more than 70 years. Because people stayed away, animals didn’t – thousands of species, including endangered birds, ended up living in and around this border.
That idea stayed in my head: a place built out of barbed wire and concrete, but also home to cranes and wetlands.
So when I started planning a trip from Barcelona to Seoul, I knew I didn’t just want palaces and street food (although I wanted those too). I wanted to see this strange overlap of history and nature with my own eyes.
I saw that most DMZ tour companies were running almost identical routes, and for the days I was considering there seemed to be plenty of availability. In the end I booked through DMZTOURS and just picked one of the cheaper options that fit my dates. Only when I got to the pick-up point did I realise that the actual tour was being operated by one of the big companies I’d noticed earlier, sending out what felt like almost ten large coaches in a row. My impression was that 'DMZTOURS (www.dmztours.com)' was simply selling seats on departures run by these larger operators rather than running its own buses, which was fine for me – I mostly cared about getting there safely and on time.


Our group left Seoul just after sunrise. The city was still waking up – people with takeaway coffee, office workers, students half asleep on the metro.
As we drove north, our guide started to explain the basics of the Korean War and the armistice. I was secretly expecting something very dramatic, but his tone was calm, almost like a teacher who has told this story many times and knows where to pause.
Little by little, the view changed. High-rise buildings turned into houses, then fields. Near the river, I started noticing fences topped with barbed wire running along the banks, and small watchtowers appearing from time to time.
It didn’t feel like an action movie, just… strange. The landscape looked like somewhere I might cycle back home, only with warning signs and guard posts.

Our first big stop was Imjingak Park. On paper it sounds like “a park near the border”, but in reality it felt more like an outdoor memory space.
There were old train carriages sitting on broken tracks, covered in rust and history. Families were tying colourful ribbons onto fences, with messages for relatives they can’t visit. One little girl was carefully writing something while her grandmother dictated the words in Korean. I couldn’t understand a single sentence, but I could feel what it meant.
The Bridge of Freedom stretches across the river here, once used by prisoners of war coming back home. Walking partway onto it, I thought about how casually I cross borders in Europe. For the people connected to this place, crossing is not a weekend plan; it’s a wish.


The Third Infiltration Tunnel was the moment when everything became very physical.
You leave your bags, put on a helmet and walk down a long, sloping passage that feels a bit like going into a mine. Then you enter the narrow rock tunnel itself. The ceiling is low enough that helmets keep knocking against it, and the air is cool and damp.
It’s not a long walk, but it’s steep on the way back up. I definitely felt my legs complaining and promised myself (again) that I would actually use my gym membership when I got home.
Close to the inner barricades, you can’t go very far, but you can see how close the tunnel came to the actual border. There are no big dramatic effects, just stone and silence, and somehow that makes it hit harder.

Our route also included a stop at a beautiful suspension bridge over a valley that may have witnessed fierce fighting during the Korean War.
By the time we got there, the scene looked almost like a normal hiking spot: families taking selfies, couples walking hand in hand, people laughing as the bridge moved a little in the wind. Below us, there was a mix of rock and green, stretching out in all directions.
More and more DMZ day tours add places like this – short walks, viewpoints, small bridges – and I liked that. It gave my mind a break without erasing the meaning of the day. Standing in the middle of the bridge, feeling the cables shake slightly, I thought about how quickly places of violence can turn into places of views and photo stops once the fighting stops.

The part I was secretly waiting for, of course, was the birds.
Near a riverside viewpoint, our guide suddenly pointed to the sky. A group of big birds was circling high above the fields. He handed me his binoculars, and I saw long legs and wide wings: cranes.
In winter, thousands of cranes and other migratory birds come to this region, feeding in rice fields and wetlands that people don’t build houses or shopping malls on because of the border. For the locals, this seasonal movement is both normal and special at the same time.
I loved that idea – that a place created by conflict has accidentally become one of the most important ecological corridors on the peninsula. On maps, the DMZ is drawn as a line. Standing there, it felt more like a thin, stubborn strip of life.


If you’re somewhere in Europe, scrolling through possible day trips from Seoul and wondering if the DMZ is “too intense” or “too touristy”, here’s how it felt to me, very honestly.
You don’t just wander in by yourself; you join an organised tour, and the day is quite structured. There are clear instructions about when you can take photos, where to stand, when to move. I actually liked this because I never felt unsafe or lost – just guided.
You do need your passport. They really check it, and I saw signs warning that you can be turned away if you don’t have it, which would be a painful mistake after waking up that early.
Comfortable shoes are not a detail. Between the tunnel, the viewpoints and little extra walks, I was on my feet a lot more than I expected. If you hate steep climbs, just be prepared to take your time on the way back up from the tunnel.
Also, don’t build your whole dream around one specific spot like the Joint Security Area. Access to certain zones can change depending on the situation, and I think it’s better to go with curiosity about the whole region – the history, the people, the landscape – rather than one photo in front of a line on the ground.


On the way back to Seoul, most people on the bus fell asleep. I couldn’t. I watched the fields and small towns pass by outside the window and tried to organise my thoughts, but they refused to sit in a neat order.
This thin strip of land holds so many layers at once: war, separation, politics, family stories, and now, strangely, cranes and other birds who don’t care about human borders.
In architecture, we talk a lot about “edges” – where inside meets outside, where one material ends and another begins. The DMZ felt like an edge on a much bigger scale, one that ordinary people didn’t choose but have to live with anyway.
Did my visit give me answers about the future of the Korean Peninsula? No. But it did something else: it made the headlines feel less like headlines and more like real lives and real places.
And that, to me, made the early alarm, the steep tunnel and the long bus ride completely worth it.