Seoul Garden Festival at Maeheon Forest 2026: Dates, Free Entry, and How to Get There

Bottom line: The autumn edition of the "2026 Seoul International Garden Festival" running through October 27 at Maeheon Citizen's Forest in Seocho-gu is free to enter. It's an 8-minute walk from Exit 5 of Maeheon Station (Yangjae Citizen's Forest) on the Sinbundang Line to a site with 51 gardens and a garden market. Don't skip it thinking it's a paid expo — go between noon and 7pm and you can also catch a docent-led garden tour.

If you didn't know: the festival's programs run from noon to 7pm only. Show up after that and both the docent tours and the garden market are already closed, leaving you with just the plantings themselves. Spend 1,550 won each way on the Sinbundang Line (3,100 won round trip) and arrive outside those hours, and you've paid that fare while missing the docent tours and market that are the actual point of the event.

Maeheon Citizen's Forest was originally called Yangjae Citizen's Forest, Korea's first forest neighborhood park, built ahead of the 1986 Asian Games and 1988 Seoul Olympics. It was renamed in 2022 after independence activist Yun Bong-gil's pen name. This autumn, the "2026 Seoul International Garden Festival," which has been running at Seoul Forest since May, has expanded here, with 51 gardens built by citizens and designers woven through the park's wooded paths.

Walk in and the first things you notice are freshly planted autumn flowers and the smell of damp soil, with each garden framed by its own fences, benches and theme. Citizen gardeners lead "garden docent" tours three times a day during program hours, and a garden market sells plant and lifestyle goods alongside. The park itself never closes, but these hands-on programs run only during set hours, so it's worth timing your visit around them.

Journey stage: During the trip · Verified 2026-10-13 · Source Seoul Metropolitan Government Media Hub