Court halts Seoul City’s Mount Nam gondola project

Cable cars glide along lines on Mount Nam in Seoul, Friday. Newsis

A court has halted the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s plan to build a new gondola on Mount Nam, ruling that officials unlawfully changed park administrative rules to circumvent height limits on construction in protected green space.

The Seoul Administrative Court on Friday ruled in favor of Namsan Cable Car, the longtime operator of the cable there, in a suit seeking to revoke the decision to alter land‑use designations to make the construction of another gondola line possible.

For that project, city authorities removed part of the area from the urban natural park zone and reclassified it as a “neighborhood park,” a category with looser building regulations.

“Under the current Urban Parks and Green Spaces Act, it is not permitted to install any building or structure exceeding a height of 12 meters within an urban natural park zone. The defendant maintains this height cap does not apply when installing track facilities, and therefore that it is permissible to install supports exceeding 12 meters in height, but this argument is difficult to accept,” the court said.

The verdict is a blow to the city government’s wider urban redesign plan aiming to make the area more convenient and accessible for tourists, especially mobility‑impaired visitors.

The mountain cable car has effectively been a monopoly for the current operator. When the government granted the business license in 1961, it did so without setting an expiration period. As long waiting times and inconvenience for wheelchair users were raised as issues, city authorities devised a plan to build a new gondola line connecting Yejang Park near Myeong-dong Station and the top of Mount Nam.

The city government said it would immediately file an appeal against the ruling, saying that the decision disregarded the public interest.

“It is one of the key policies of the Seoul Metropolitan Government, intended to guarantee access for transportation‑disadvantaged people, such as those with limited mobility and the elderly,” it said in a statement. “In the appeal, we will clearly demonstrate the legality of the urban management plan change, as well as the necessity of the policy and public interest.”