North Korea debuts new beach resort in tourism push
Global News
The new beach resort will be open to domestic visitors on July 1, KCNA confirmed, but there was no mention of allowing international tourists.
North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has officially opened a new beach resort in the country’s Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Zone — six years after it was due to be completed, state media reported on Thursday.
The massive tourist zone, located on North Korea’s east coast, is part of a key project pushed by Kim Jong Un for years to promote tourism in the notoriously exclusionist country.
With “great satisfaction,” Kim attended an inaugural ceremony for the Wonsan Kalma coastal tourist area, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said, adding that the resort can accommodate about 20,000 visitors and that the country would build more large-scale tourist zones quickly.
According to the national news agency, the tourist area offers sunbathing facilities along a four-kilometre beach and various sports, amusement, commercial and public catering services as well as a wide variety of accommodations, year-round.
The area has long been a vacation destination for locals, but Kim wanted to transform it into a sprawling billion-dollar tourism hotspot inspired by “Korean-style tourism.”
“When Kim Jong Un arrived, stormy cheers of ‘Hurrah!’ resounded far and wide,” the KCNA reported.
Tourism in North Korea is not an industry targeted by United Nations sanctions, but the elusive country did not collaborate with any foreign partner to develop the Wonsan project because of economic sanctions over its nuclear weapons programs.
North Korea is one of the world’s most impoverished countries, and has been run by the Kim family since 1948, who channel most of the isolated state’s capital into its military, national monuments and landmarks in Pyongyang, the country’s capital.
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