Lovely Runner Filming Locations in Suwon: The Wall Is Free, the Palace Is Not

Two thousand won. That is the entire admission charge at the centre of this article, and almost everyone who arrives in Suwon for Lovely Runner pays it in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or does not need to pay it at all.

The problem is the names. 수원화성 (Su-won Hwa-seong) is the fortress — five and a half kilometres of wall with four gates, wrapped around the old town. 화성행궁 (Hwa-seong Haeng-gung) is the palace inside it. In English both get flattened to “Hwaseong,” and the ticket rules for the two are not similar at all.

One of these charges you and one of them does not

The wall is not a ticketed attraction. It has no gate, no counter and no closing time, and the operator says so in one line:

You can walk onto the rampart at two in the morning and nobody will stop you. The fee table on the same page — the one that says ₩2,000 — applies to the palace and to Hwaryeongjeon, the shrine beside it. Nothing else.

Checked against the operator’s page on 2026-08-17.

Three things in that table cost people a day. Last entry at the palace is 17:00, a full hour before the stated closing time. The trolley leaves from Yeonmudae, on the far east side of the circuit, not from the palace where most visitors start. And the combined ticket only pays for itself if you actually want two museums — at ₩4,000 it is double the palace alone.

Where the drama actually was

Lovely Runner was filmed around 행궁동 (Haeng-gung-dong), the neighbourhood inside the walls, and specifically along the lanes near 화홍문 (Hwa-hong-mun) — the water gate at the top of this page, where the wall crosses the Suwoncheon stream. Kyunghyang Shinmun, reporting from the area, places the romance scenes on that stretch: the water gate, the stepping stones across the stream, and 방화수류정 (Bang-hwa-su-ryu-jeong), the pavilion just above it.

The same report identifies the two spots people actually queue for. Hwahong Mart, a corner shop on the culture street, gave the crew the run of the store and now has stills from the episodes pinned up outside. And the house where Im Sol lived at nineteen is now a café.

We are grading this as reported rather than official. The production filmed openly enough that local traders described it to a reporter on the record, and the operator’s tourism site keeps a section called TV속 수원화성 — “Suwon Hwaseong on TV” — though it points off to a blog rather than to a filming register we could check. What we did not find is a statement from the production company naming these addresses. So we are not going to write one.

Someone lives behind the blue gate

The house used for Ryu Sun-jae, opposite the café, is a private home with residents in it. The newspaper that reported the location said so in the same breath as reporting it, which is unusual and worth repeating: this is a lane where people take their bins out.

Photograph the gate from the street, keep your voice down, and do not go up to it. Fans arrive here with yellow umbrellas — that part is a genuine local custom now, and it is fine. Knocking is not.

The exemptions, and the one we could not pin down

You do not have to pay the ₩2,000 at all if you turn up in 한복 (han-bok). The operator’s wording is broad:

That is the same mechanism the Seoul palaces use, and the same arguments about what counts apply — we have written up what gets accepted and what gets refused in detail.

Beyond hanbok, admission is free for visitors aged 65 and over with ID and for children under six. Entry is also free on Culture Day, the last Wednesday of each month — but explicitly not during the night opening, which is the one time most travellers would want it.

Here is where the sources stop agreeing. The foundation publishes the same exemption table on two of its own sites. On the Suwon Hwaseong tourism site, the block listing the age, voting, disability and multi-child exemptions carries the note “내국인만 적용” — Korean nationals only. On the foundation’s own site the equivalent note is narrower, marking only the multi-child clause as limited to Suwon residents. Same operator, same table, two different scopes.

We are not going to guess which is current. The practical reading: hanbok, 65-and-over with ID, and under-six are the three a foreign visitor can reasonably expect to be honoured, and even those get decided at the ticket window. Bring the ID. Budget the ₩2,000 anyway.

Night, and what it costs

From 1 May to 1 November 2026 the palace opens again in the evening, Friday to Sunday and on public holidays, 18:00–21:30 with last entry at 21:00. The foundation notes the dates can move at its discretion. Today falls inside that window, but it closes for the winter and the daytime hours are all you get from November.

The wall, of course, does not close at all. If the night opening is finished for the year or you have missed the last entry, the stream and the water gate are lit and free, and that is the stretch the drama used anyway.

Getting there, and the name that sends people to the wrong city

Suwon Station sits on Seoul Subway Line 1 and takes about an hour from Seoul Station with no change. Using the city’s published fare rule — a ₩1,550 base fare with a card, plus ₩100 for every 5 km past the first 10 km — the ride works out at roughly ₩2,200–2,400. That is a figure we calculated from the rule rather than one quoted on a fare table, so treat it as an estimate; the full fare structure is here.

The fortress is not at the station. It is about 2 km north, and the walk is along an ordinary arterial road. Take a bus or a taxi for that leg.

One more trap, and it is the worst one. 화성시 (Hwa-seong-si) is Hwaseong City — a separate municipality roughly 30 km away, with its own government and its own cultural foundation. English maps and booking sites render it “Hwaseong,” identically to the fortress. If you are searching in English, search “Suwon Hwaseong” with Suwon attached, every time. Accommodation booked in Hwaseong City is not near the wall and there is no easy transfer.

If you would rather ask a person: the Suwon General Tourist Information Centre is near Exit 4 of Suwon Station, open 09:00–18:00, with English, Chinese and Japanese interpretation available.

What this article does not claim

Fees, hours and the night-opening dates are as published by the Suwon Cultural Foundation on 2026-08-17 and were read from the operator’s own pages, not from aggregators. Korean admission fees change by municipal ordinance, and this one was last raised in February 2025 — check before you budget precisely.

The filming locations are reported by Kyunghyang Shinmun from the neighbourhood, not confirmed by the production. We have not walked these lanes ourselves. We are not naming the café or the blue-gate house by address, and we would ask you not to either — one of them is a home.

The Seoul–Suwon fare is calculated from the published distance formula, not quoted. Exact ticketed fares differ by card type and entry station.

Photographs on this page are Korea Tourism Organization aerial images of Suwon Hwaseong. They show the fortress, not the drama’s shooting locations, and we have captioned them for what they are. We requested images of Hwaseong Haenggung as well; what arrived was a hotel of a similar name, and those four frames were discarded rather than published.

Suwon Hwaseong was built in the 1790s by King Jeongjo, who moved his father's grave and then moved the town, and the fortress is the result of that grief becoming a construction project. The whole build was documented in the *Hwaseong Seongyeok Uigwe*, a record so exact that it is what made the twentieth-century restoration possible after the wall was damaged in the colonial period and the Korean War. Suwon has since become a standing set for period productions for the same reason it draws visitors — it is a walled town centre that still has a town inside it.