North Korea: Six Attractions and Natural Wonders

A country visited only on its own terms

North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is one of the most isolated and tightly controlled countries on earth, ruled by the Kim dynasty since its founding in 1948 and organised around the Juche state ideology of self-reliance. Foreign tourism, where it exists at all, happens exclusively through licensed tour operators on fixed, guide-accompanied itineraries — there is no independent travel, and the country has been closed to almost all foreign tourists since January 2020, apart from Russian tour groups admitted from 2024 and a brief reopening to other foreigners in February 2025 that ended the following month.

The six below are the sights shown to the small number of visitors who have been able to travel there on organised tours. Read the note at the end first: this is a destination most governments advise against visiting at all.

1. The Mansudae Grand Monument

The Mansudae Grand Monument, on a hill in central Pyongyang, holds 22-metre bronze statues of former leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, before which all visitors are expected to bow and at which foreigners are given the option of laying flowers. It is treated as the most solemn and tightly regulated site foreign visitors encounter, with strict rules on dress, photography, and behaviour.

2. The Juche Tower

The Juche Tower, across the river from Kim Il-sung Square, is a 170-metre granite obelisk topped by an illuminated red torch, built for Kim Il-sung's 70th birthday in 1982 to symbolise the country's founding ideology. A viewing platform just below the torch, reached by elevator, gives wide views over Pyongyang.

3. The Pyongyang Metro

The Pyongyang Metro, among the deepest in the world, was built to double as a massive bomb and fallout shelter, and its stations are correspondingly elaborate — chandeliers, mosaic murals, and marble columns celebrating revolutionary history. Foreign tourists were once confined to a single stretch between two stations; since 2014 tour groups have been able to visit stations on both lines, always accompanied by their guides.

4. Mount Kumgang

Mount Kumgang ("Diamond Mountain"), on the east coast near the border with South Korea, is renowned in Korean culture and art for its jagged granite peaks, waterfalls, and Buddhist temples, celebrated for centuries in poetry and painting on both sides of the divided peninsula. A South Korean-run tourist resort operated here between 1998 and 2008, offering rare direct North-South tourism, before the programme was suspended after a South Korean tourist was shot dead in 2008; the resort's facilities were reported in 2022 to be being dismantled on Kim Jong-un's orders. In 2025 Mount Kumgang was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

5. The Arch of Triumph

Pyongyang's Arch of Triumph, completed in 1982, commemorates Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule and Kim Il-sung's role in it, modelled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris but built 10 metres taller, at 60 metres. It stands on Triumph Return Square at the foot of Moran Hill, bears the year 1945, when Korea was liberated, and has been a standard stop on guided tours of Pyongyang.

6. The Demilitarized Zone at Panmunjom

The Demilitarized Zone, a heavily fortified four-kilometre buffer separating North and South Korea since the 1953 armistice, can be visited from the North Korean side (as from the South) at the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom, where soldiers of both countries face each other across the actual demarcation line. It is one of the most tightly controlled and symbolically loaded sites either country offers to visitors, presented very differently depending on which side one approaches from.

Before you go: a serious note

Independent tourism to North Korea does not exist: all foreign visitors travel on fixed, pre-approved itineraries with government-assigned guides who accompany them at all times, and unscripted interaction with ordinary North Koreans is essentially impossible. The country closed entirely to foreign tourism in January 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic; since then it has admitted Russian tour groups (from 2024) and briefly reopened the Rason area to other foreigners in February 2025, before closing the border again in March 2025; Western passport holders, including US citizens, have long faced separate, tighter restrictions, and the US State Department bars its citizens from travelling on US passports without a special validation. Most Western governments advise against all travel to North Korea, citing the serious risk of arbitrary arrest and detention and the near-total absence of consular protection once inside the country — a risk illustrated by past cases in which foreign visitors on organised tours were arrested and held, among them the US student Otto Warmbier, sentenced in 2016 to 15 years for taking a poster from his hotel.

This article describes what licensed tours have historically shown visitors, for reference. Any actual travel decision should rest on current, specific government advice and a clear understanding of these constraints, not on the description here.