North Korea set to open its biggest tourist site, though it still largely blocks foreigners

North Korea next week will open a signature coastal tourist site which, according to him, will inaugurate a new era in its tourism industry, although there is no word on the moment when the country will fully reopen for foreign visitors.

The Wonsan-Kalma coastal tourist area has hotels and other accommodation for nearly 20,000 people who can swim in the sea, engage in sports and recreational activities and eat in restaurants and cafeterias on site, the media said.

The North Korean leader Kim Jong has a tour of the site and reduced the inaugural band during a sumptuous ceremony on Tuesday, the Central Korean Central Press Agency reported on Thursday.

Kim said its construction would be recorded as “one of the greatest successes this year” and qualified the “proud first stage” site towards the achievement of the government’s policy to develop tourism, according to KCNA.

North Korea will first open the site to national tourists

The Wonsan-Kalma Beach Resort is the largest tourist site in North Korea. KCNA said North Korea will start service for national tourists next Tuesday. He did not say that when North Korea begins to receive foreign tourists, but Russian officials later said Thursday that the first Russian tour on the site would occur in July.

Observers say that the complex probably required a huge investment in the limited budget of North Korea, so it will ultimately have to accept the Chinese and other foreign tourists to break.

Kim pushed a tourist center to make the country in the context of efforts to rekindle the economy in difficulty, and the Wonsan-Kalma area is one of its most discussed tourist projects. KCNA reported that North Korea will also confirm the construction plans of large tourist sites in other parts of the country.

But North Korea has not fully raised the ban on foreign tourists it imposed in early 2020 to protect itself against the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say that North Korea has been slow to resume its international tourism due to the remaining pandemic borders, a push of Tensions with the United States and South Korea In recent years and concerns about Western tourists diffusing a negative image of its system.

Russian tourists soon expected

The Russian region Primorsky, which borders North Korea, said that the first group of Russian tourists at the station will leave on July 7. The region’s press service said that during their eight-day trip, Russian tourists will also have the opportunity to visit the main attractions in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, according to the Russian news agency Tass.

From February 2024, North Korea already accepted Russian tourists in other regions in the middle The booming army And other partnerships between the two countries, but Chinese group visits, which represented more than 90% of visitors before the pandemic, stayed at neutral.

In February of this year, a small group of international tourists visited North Korea for the first time in five years, but tourism agencies said in March that their visits to North Korea had been interrupted.

Kim’s recent foreign policy deprives relations with Russia because he has provided conventional troops and weapons to support his war against Ukraine in exchange for economic and military assistance. But the links of North Korea with China, which has long been its largest trading partner and help the benefactors, have apparently cooled because China hesitates to join an anti-Western alliance with North Korea and Russia, according to analysts.

The Tuesday ceremony which marked the completion of the construction of the station attracted the Russian ambassador to North Korea and its Embassy staff, said KCNA. But that didn’t say if Chinese diplomats were also invited.

“There seems to be problems that North Korea has not yet resolved in its relations with China. But North Korea has put too much money on tourism and plans to spend more. Subsequently, to obtain its money, North Korea cannot help but receive Chinese tourists,” said Lee Sangkeun, an expert from the Institute of National Security Strategy, a thought group managed by the Intelligence Agency South.

Lim eul-chul, professor at the Kyungnam University Institute for Extreme Oriental studies in Seoul, also said that foreign tourism on the Wonsan-Kalma site will start with the Russians. But he said that Chinese tours in the area, a kind of civilian exchange, will also start soon, adding bilateral trade between China and North Korea convalescent.

South Korean and American visits will probably not happen soon

LIM said that the South Korean and American tours in North Korea will probably do not reddemnate anytime soon, although the new Liberal South Korean president Jae Myung and the US President Trump expressed their hope of relaunching dialogue with North Korea.

In January, when Mr. Trump boasted of his links with Kim, he said: “I think he has huge condo capacities. He has a lot of shore”, a probable reference to Wonsan-Kalma.

North Korea has not publicly responded to the awareness of Mr. Trump. He repeatedly rejected the offers of the dialogue of Washington and Seoul and focused on the expansion of his nuclear weapons program since nuclear diplomacy with high Kim stakes with Mr. Trump collapsed in 2019.