North Korea opening a tourist site on its east coast next week

SEOUL

North Korea next week will open a signature coastal tourist site that it says will usher in a new era in its tourism industry, though there is no word on when the country will fully reopen its borders to foreign visitors.

Observers say North Korea's Wonsan-Kalma beach resort on its east coast is its biggest tourist site and likely required huge investments from the impoverished North's limited budget.

Given that, they say North Korea will eventually accept Chinese and other foreign tourists because it can't break even with domestic visitors alone.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un toured the site and cut the inaugural tape at a lavish ceremony on June 24, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Thursday.

KCNA said the Wonsan-Kalma coastal tourist zone has hotels and other accommodations for nearly 20,000 guests who can swim in the sea, play sports and other recreation activities and eat at restaurants and cafeterias on site.

The tourist zone will begin service for domestic tourists July 1, KCNA said. But it didn't say when it will start receiving foreign tourists.

Kim has been pushing to make the country a tourism hub as part of efforts to revive the ailing economy, and the Wonsan-Kalma zone is one of his most talked-about tourism projects.

KCNA reported North Korea will confirm plans to build large tourist sites in other parts of the country, too.

Experts say North Korea has been slow to resume its international tourism because of remaining pandemic curbs, a flare-up of tensions with the U.S. and South Korea in recent years and worries about Western tourists spreading a negative image of its system.

Starting from February 2024, North Korea has been accepting Russian tourists amid the booming military and other partnerships between the two countries, but Chinese group tours, which made up more than 90 percent of visitors before the pandemic, remain stalled.

In February this year, a small group of international tourists visited the country for the first time in five years, but tourist agencies said in March that their tours to North Korea were paused.

“I think North Korea will soon accept Russian tourists, given the Russian Embassy officials attended the ceremony. Summer business is important" for the beach resort, said Lee Sangkeun, an expert at the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank run by South Korea’s intelligence agency.

“There seems to be issues that North Korea hasn't yet resolved in its relations with China. But North Korea has put in too much money on tourism and plans to spend more. Subsequently, to get its money's worth, North Korea can't help receiving Chinese tourists,” Lee said.

Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul said that South Korean and American tours to North Korea won't likely resume anytime soon, though both new liberal South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and U.S. President Donald Trump have expressed hopes to revive dialogue with North Korea.

In January when Trump boasted about his ties with Kim, he said “I think he has tremendous condo capabilities. He’s got a lot of shoreline,” a likely reference to Wonsan-Kalma.