Mudeungsan

Mudeungsan National Park was declared in 2013 and covers some 75 km² next to the city of Gwangju, in south-western South Korea, extending also into the counties of Hwasun and Damyang. It was the country's twenty-first national park and one of the last to be declared.

Its most singular feature is geological. The mountain's summits are crowned by spectacular colonnades of volcanic rock: Ipseokdae and Seoseokdae are groupings of vertical prisms several metres high, formed by the cooling and contraction of lava flows some eighty-five million years ago and later exposed by erosion. Those formations, known in Korean as jusangjeolli, are designated a natural monument and are the park's emblem.

The mountain is also the reference open space for the people of Gwangju, with a symbolic charge reinforced by its part in the memory of the 1980 democratic uprising. The forest is temperate deciduous, with oak, maple and bamboo at lower altitudes, and the summit has high-altitude grassland. In 2018 UNESCO recognised the area as the Mudeungsan UNESCO Global Geopark, a designation covering a wider area than the national park and including dinosaur footprint sites in Hwasun.