What sets Woljeonggyo apart is that a building sits on top of the bridge. Roofed along its length with pavilions at both ends, this type is called a nugyo. You cross it out of the rain, and the crossing itself becomes architecture. Placed in the Silla capital between Wolseong, where the palace stood, and the direction of Namsan, it was almost certainly less a thoroughfare than a statement about the standing of the city.
Reconstruction took a long time. Excavations from the 1980s confirmed the positions of the piers and traces of timber left in the water, and the scale and structure were inferred from those. But no Unified Silla nugyo survives in physical form, so the details had to be reassembled from contemporaneous architectural styles and written sources. That is why a discussion of 'reconstruction versus reinvention' follows this bridge, and knowing it changes how you look: what stands before you is not Silla's, but something built now on the evidence of Silla.
The best time is just after sunset. For roughly thirty minutes the lights come on while the sky is still blue, and the red columns set against deep indigo are mirrored whole in the water. That is why photographers gather then. By day you can walk across and study the structure, and the pavilions house a display explaining the reconstruction process.
Woljeonggyo connects on foot to the rest of central Gyeongju. The Wolseong palace site lies immediately north, and beyond it Cheomseongdae and Daereungwon. Cross south and you reach the foot of Namsan, a mountain covered end to end in Buddhist remains that deserves a full day of its own. Seeing Woljeonggyo in the evening, eating nearby, then continuing to the night view at Donggung-Wolji is a common way to build an evening here.