Build it and They Will Come, Hopes North Korea, As It Opens New Beach Resort

In Spain, locals shoot water pistols at tourists while cities around Europe institute fees for landmarks. In Bali, there are brochures for tourists on how to behave.  

And in Mexico, protesters harass tourists, smash storefronts, and protest with signs reading, “gringos go home,” angry at a rising number of visitors they say are pricing them out of their homes. 

At hotspots around the world, surging tourism has led to local fury as local governments grapple with the fallout but want to continue earning the billions tourists bring in.  

North Korea, however, doesn’t have this problem, say analysts. But it seemingly would like to.  

In an effort to stimulate tourism, it recently opened a new beach resort called Wonsan Kalma on the east coast: It hosted its first tourists from Russia earlier this month.  

It’s a “world-class tourist and cultural destination,” said North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, who hopes it will boost tourism to the country, known as the Hermit Kingdom, because it is closed off to much of the world. It’s “the proud first step” toward developing tourism, he added.

The resort sits on a 2.5-mile stretch of beach, with hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, and a water park, and can accommodate up to 20,000 visitors, according to state media outlet, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). 

North Koreans began visiting in early July, playing with inflatable balls in the open water, using water slides or just lounging on the beach. 

“The guests’ hearts were filled with overwhelming emotion as they felt the astonishing new heights of our-style tourism culture blossoming under the era of the Workers’ Party,” KCNA said.  

Still, the country isn’t letting Western tourists in anytime soon – this week, it announced it would “temporarily” ban foreigners from the resort. 

“I was hoping this might signal a broader reopening to international tourism, but unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case for now,” Rowan Beard, co-founder of Young Pioneer Tours, told the BBC. Even so, it is “unlikely to be a major draw for most Western tourists,” he added. 

North Korea began turning toward tourism after the United Nations imposed sanctions in 2017 that banned all of ​the country’s main exports to stop the country from financing its nuclear and missile programs.  

Kim saw tourism as a way to earn badly needed foreign currency and has been building spas and ski resorts. North Korea is among the poorest countries in the world and struggles to feed its people even as it spends lavishly on its military and monuments in homage to the Kim family that has ruled the country with an iron fist since 1948.  

Since 2022, North Korea has been slowly easing the restrictions it imposed during the pandemic and reopening its borders in phases. However, Chinese tourists, who made up more than 90 percent of visitors before 2020 and numbered in the hundreds of thousands, remain unable to visit because of strained bilateral ties.  

Russian tourists, however, have been allowed in amid expanding military cooperation between the countries as well as warm relations – North Korea has provided thousands of soldiers to help Russia fight Ukraine.  

Even so, Russians visiting the country number fewer than a thousand, hardly enough to significantly expand the country’s tourism industry, analysts said.  

Meanwhile, some tour operators believe if the country opens its borders to Westerners, there will be some demand.  

For example, in February, North Korea allowed a small group of Western tourists and others to cross the border from China and visit the city of Rason. But it halted that tour program within a month without explanation.  

Still, Indian travel blogger, Bhuvani Dharan, was on that trip and wrote about his impressions, saying the visit was tightly controlled, staged, often perplexing, and even a little frightening.  

During their four-day stay, the group visited a museum, a deer park, multiple schools, a few factories, and even courtrooms. “Things that seem ordinary in other countries were highlighted as points of pride here,” he wrote. “The group was sometimes taken on longer routes to reach destinations that were actually nearby – likely to give the illusion that they were travelling far and wide.” 

He doubts he will be allowed to visit again, he added: “They told us clearly – if we say anything negative about North Korea in our videos or posts, we’ll never be granted entry again. So, no, I don’t think I’ll ever go back.”