Mountain village is often known as 'a village placed in deep mountains' or 'a place where lots of trees exist', but it is also used to simply describe an area distinguished from cities or farm countries. Also, it is also known as a part of farm countries, or often acknowledged as poor, undeveloped, socially void areas.

Mountain village is quite different from ordinary farm countries in spatial location, social and economical conditions and population. A mountain village in Korea is a village surrounded by forests, with higher rate of forest land occupancy, low income, low cultural benefit, all of which result in low maintenance of socal environment and low population.

According to the classification by National Forest and Science Academy in 2003, standards of designating forestry promoting area is over 70% of forest rate, reflecting usability of forest and how deep it is located in the mountain. On the other hand, selecting areas with cultivated acereage rate of 21% or lower is reflecting low income areas according to the standard of the average cultivated acereage rate in each eup / myeon throughout the country. Also, the population density of 111 people/㎢ which is the average population density of eup and myeon area throughout the country. According to this index, 4,972 ri in 508 eup / myeon throughout the country apply to this category, and the area of 3,755,000 ha has been classified as mountain villages. This is 58.5% of total forest area (6,416,000ha) of the whole country.