Songnisan

Songnisan National Park was declared in 1970 at the geographical centre of South Korea, between the provinces of North Chungcheong and North Gyeongsang, on the Sobaek range. Its name means "the mountain remote from the vulgar world", a reference to its character as a place of spiritual retreat.

The relief is one of rounded granite summits and ridges, with wooded valleys and clear streams. The vegetation is temperate forest, with Korean red pine on the sunny slopes and deciduous broadleaves on the shaded ones, and the autumn colouring is one of its main attractions.

At the heart of the park stands the temple of Beopjusa, founded in the sixth century and one of the most important Buddhist complexes in the country. It preserves the only multi-storey wooden pagoda left in Korea, the Palsangjeon, and holds a colossal gilt-bronze statue of the Maitreya Buddha some thirty metres high, raised in the twentieth century on the site of an earlier one. Beside the approach road to the temple stands the Jeongipum pine, a historic tree to which, according to tradition, King Sejo granted a court rank in the fifteenth century for having raised its branches to let the royal palanquin pass; it is a protected natural monument.