A new waterfront resort opened for business this week in North Korea with P.R. hype — but without the foreign visitors that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, hoped would one day arrive with tourist cash to offset financially punishing sanctions.
On Thursday, state media reported on North Korean families crowding a 2.5-mile-long scenic sandy beach on its central east coast, which began accepting tourists two days earlier. “The joy and optimism of the tourists were overflowing everywhere, and the song of happiness resounded in the windows of bright lodgings,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.
The resort, which is called Wonsan Kalma and can accommodate 20,000 people, is the most ambitious among the seafront or mountainside spa and ski resorts Mr. Kim has been building to attract foreign tourists. Mr. Kim, his wife and his daughter attended a ceremony in late June marking the completion of the facility.
Mr. Kim began promoting tourism after the United Nations imposed severe sanctions in 2017 that banned all of his country’s main exports, including coal and textiles. The sanctions were designed to strip North Korea of the means of earning foreign currency to finance its nuclear and missile programs. But they did not affect tourism, which Mr. Kim saw as a new source of sorely needed foreign currency.
Mr. Kim’s aims were best displayed in the transformation of Kalma Beach. North Korea used to fill it with pieces of artillery during military drills. In recent years, however, Mr. Kim has lined the beach with newly built water parks and multistory resort hotels. South Korean media nicknamed Kalma Beach “North Korea’s Waikiki.”
But Mr. Kim’s tourism plans did not go as he had hoped. The pandemic led North Korea to shut its borders and dried up a stream of tourists from China that had numbered 300,000 a year. Mr. Kim’s new resort complexes remained half-finished or empty during that period. The country reopened its borders in 2023.
In recent months, visits by hundreds of tourists from Russia have reflected warming ties between Pyongyang and Moscow, after North Korea supplied much-needed personnel and weaponry to aid Russia in its war against Ukraine.
But China has yet to allow its citizens to travel to North Korea. Beijing is widely believed to be wary that North Korea will grow too close to Russia, which could reduce its leverage over a recalcitrant Pyongyang.
South Korea — the only other country that shares a border with North Korea — stopped sending tourists to the North in 2008, when it closed a joint inter-Korean tourism complex.
On Thursday, North Korea’s state media released photos showing North Korean families bathing, water skiing, riding water slides and playing volleyball in the sand, as well as children splashing in the water with swimming tubes. But no foreign tourists were in sight.
Russian tourists were expected to visit the beach over the summer, South Korean officials said. But their numbers would be small, they said, given limited transportation options in North Korea (Kalma is about 130 miles, or 210 kilometers, from Pyongyang) and poor road conditions between the Russian border and Kalma Beach.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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