Step inside this healing spot inside Civilian Control Line in Paju

“Please prepare for a brief security check.”

As the bus doors open, a soldier in combat gear boards and collects the identification cards of each passenger. The soldier looks to be in his early 20s, but the scene, reminiscent of something from a movie, is enough to make passengers slightly tense. After collecting all the IDs from the roughly 10 passengers, the soldier gets off the bus.

“The IDs will be returned when we come back,” the guide explains, putting everyone at ease again.

This is a checkpoint on the Civilian Control Line, the northernmost point that civilians can freely travel to. If you see a chartered bus crossing the line into the Civilian Control Zone and assume that the passengers are taking part in a security tour or academic research, you would be wrong.

They are vacationers.

They are heading into the forest beyond the Civilian Control Line to relax and recharge — walking on moss, picking up fresh chestnuts and meditating to the sounds of insects and birds.

A new opportunity is opening for individuals to visit the Civilian Control Zone for leisure, a place that has traditionally been difficult to access unless one had a residence or farmland there. "DMZ Forest" in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, is preparing to hold its first "Open Week" for the general public this month. Until now, the site has mainly operated for group visits and private rentals.

The name DMZ Forest may suggest that it is located inside the Demilitarized Zone, but it is actually in the Civilian Control Zone just south of the DMZ’s southern boundary, known as the Southern Limit Line.

DMZ Forest is a private recreational forest covering about 90,000 square meters. At first glance, it looks like a forest, a naturalistic garden and an outdoor educational center all at once. That is because it is essentially an experimental space.

“There are about 39 million pyeong (128.9 million square meters) of land north of the Civilian Control Line in Paju alone, and this enormous area has been left as a ‘vacuum’ of unused space,” said Lim Mi-ryeo, CEO of DMZ Forest. “DMZ Forest is a place to experiment with how this idle space can be put to use.”

The site serves as a kind of sandbox for exploring how the northern part of the Civilian Control Zone can be developed without damaging nature, and how the area can become part of the local community rather than simply being developed around the conventional concept of security tourism, she said.

For the first three years, Lim tried farming, as other local residents did.

“My flower farming failed miserably in the first year,” she said. “It took me three full years to realize that making a living through farming was almost impossible.”

She then spent two years becoming part of the local community while considering what to create on the land.

The decision to turn it into a forest took shape five years ago, when she began full-scale landscaping and environmental work. Looking back, it seems like a natural conclusion.

During her years as an undergraduate at Ewha Womans University, Lim spent more than half her time outside the campus and in nature. She first took a part-time job filming nature documentaries to earn tuition money, then became so immersed in nature that she took a total of four years off from school to focus on nature photography, mountaineering and environmental surveys.

After graduating, she worked for an academic organization affiliated with the Korea Forest Service, conducting ecological surveys in the Civilian Control Zone. That was how she first became connected to the area north of the Civilian Control Line.

'Human touch’ completes nature

Visitors may be slightly puzzled when they first get off at the DMZ Forest parking lot. It looks much like a makeshift parking area beside a rural road.

That was intentional, according to Lim. The area was deliberately designed to look somewhat barren so that visitors would experience a contrast as they walked over the hill and into DMZ Forest, giving them the feeling that they had suddenly entered nature.

The concept is also closely tied to the history of DMZ Forest.

It is easy to assume that the Civilian Control Zone, where human access has been limited, must have well-preserved natural ecosystems. Indeed, numerous surveys have found rich biodiversity in the area, including species found only north of the Civilian Control Line.

But that is only one side of the ecosystem.

Another characteristic of the area is what Lim calls a state of “neglected imbalance.” Because even the minimum level of management provided by ecological policies is absent, ecosystems can lose their balance and become distorted.

“Normally, when invasive plants enter an area, they are managed to protect native plants and prevent a single species from becoming overly dominant, thereby maintaining ecological diversity,” Lim said. “But there is no intervention here at all.”

In particular, most forests inside the Civilian Control Zone are oak-dominated forests, in which a single tree species accounts for most of the vegetation.

“The oaks that returned most quickly after the war grew densely, preventing the middle and lower layers of the forest from developing,” Lim said, stressing the need for human intervention.

To address this, DMZ Forest carried out thinning operations, removing overcrowded oak trees and growing shiitake mushrooms on the logs. Chestnut trees, which are harder than oak, were turned into structures such as tables, stairs and drainage channels.

Moss was planted on exposed soil to fill out the lower layer of the forest, while young trees were planted to create the middle layer.

In other words, people intervened to restore and gradually rebuild an impoverished ecosystem.

Nature and humans are often viewed as being in opposition, but in the end, humans can also play a role in restoring and enriching nature.

‘Healing’ inside Civilian Control Zone

The first program attended by visitors that day was a singing bowl meditation session.

As participants gently closed their eyes on yoga mats spread across the grass, the soft sound of the singing bowl rang through the forest.

The birds that had been singing long before participants arrived and the insects that had been calling naturally joined the sound, almost as those they had somehow become part of a quartet without uttering a word.

After the refreshing meditation, participants moved on to make their own terrariums.

They placed volcanic rock and moss, both resembling those found at DMZ Forest, inside small glass jars. As a tiny ecosystem — a piece of the forest itself — it would be hard to find a better souvenir.

As the participants walked down the steps toward the glass greenhouse to make the terrariums, something suddenly jumped up from the ground.

It was a small Korean brown frog, apparently intent on going wherever it wanted regardless of what the people around it were doing.

Perhaps pleased with the damp, moss-covered forest path, it stopped hopping and simply sat there with its belly against the ground, staring indifferently into the distance.

After completing the activities, visitors wrap up the day with tea and refreshments while taking in the beautiful scenery.

The area shown to reporters that day covered only about 25 percent of the entire site, or roughly 22,500 square meters. Other parts of the forest will offer more active experiences, including Nordic walking, programs for people with dogs and trail running.

The Open Week program, running throughout October, was selected as one of Gyeonggi Province’s 2026 local tourism content projects and will receive support from the Gyeonggi Tourism Organization.

Based on the pilot program, DMZ Forest plans to develop a model for permanent operations.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.