North Korea Promotes Beach Resort as 2026's Hottest Tourist Destination

Multiple news outlets noted at the end of the year that the communist government of North Korea is prominently featuring the Wonsan Kalma Tourist Area on its official calendars, including those meant for Chinese tourists – an indication that it will be heavily promoting travel to the beach resort region in the next year.

Communist dictator Kim Jong-un has spent the better part of a decade investing in developing the Wonsan beach area into a world-class tourist destination, financially out of reach for majority of North Korea’s impoverished population and intended to fund the nation’s unproductive and destitute economy. After a prolonged delay in construction during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic – which resulted in a rift between China and North Korea that Russia exploited – Kim opened the Wonsan Kalma Tourist Area to visitors this summer. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was among its first celebrity visitors.

According to the South China Morning Post, the 2026 North Korean government calendar for prospective Chinese tourists featured attractive photos of Wonsan’s newly erected hotels and resort areas, as well as the beach. The Post relayed the description of the images from Japan’s Kyodo News, which reportedly obtained a copy of the calendar. Copies of the alleged calendar in South Korean media show aerial photos of the beach and neighboring high-rise buildings that appear to be hotels.

The magazine Travel and Tour World described Wonsan in an article for would-be visitors as a “scenic city on the country’s east coast,” attractive to those seeking a beachside getaway in North Korea particularly in 2026 due to the related announcement of the return of the Pyongyang International Marathon.

“For many years, China has been the largest source of tourists to North Korea, and it remains a key market for the country’s post-pandemic tourism revival,” the magazine observed, adding that the Pyongyang marathon is scheduled to take place on April 6.

Wonsan also reportedly appeared on the calendars the North Korean regime publishes for its elite officials. According to the outlet NK Insider, North Korea publishes multiple calendars a year, both internally and for sympathetic foreigners, meant as “a state propaganda tool that signals the intentions of the Party and its leader” for the next year. This year, the calendars prominently featured Wonsan, as well as the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles and Mount Paektu, the iconic volcano deemed sacred within the communist worship of the Kim family in the country.

“The new calendars indicate that Kim Jong-un’s priorities for 2026 are strengthening military power and nuclear weapons, reinforcing the legitimacy of the three-generation succession, and earning foreign currency through international tourism,” NK Insider assessed. The specific use of images of Wonsan, it continued, “reflects the regime’s strategy to attract foreign tourists and secure hard currency. Tourism is being used as a means of funding the regime and sustaining the system.”

North Korea is one of the world’s most oppressive communist regimes, forcing its population to worship dictator Kim Jong-un and his family or be forced into state labor camps for generations. Under its songbun system, society is divided by closeness and loyalty to the Kim family; those with relatives even two generations away considered anti-communists, Christians, or otherwise “undesirable” face torture, executions, or a lifetime in labor camps. The United Nations verified this year that Pyongyang continues to deny the vast majority of North Koreans their civil liberties and maintains a barely functional state where most struggle to feed themselves and have no access to serviceable health care.

Similarly to the fellow communist government of Cuba, all evidence suggests that Kim Jong-un’s regime has invested very little in the wellbeing of citizens, opting instead to spend millions of dollars on its illicit nuclear weapons program. Kim has made clear he intends to turn tourism into a primary industry in the country, expanding it beyond the traditional “red tourism” by elderly Chinese communists seeking nostalgia to more traditional activities. In addition to the construction of the Masikryong Ski Resort, which opened in 2014, Kim Jong-un announced plans to develop a beachside retreat in Wonsan in 2013. Construction began in earnest in 2018, a year after the United States banned its citizens from visiting the country following the torture and killing of 22-year-old American tourist Otto Warmbier.

At the time, China remained North Korea’s closest ally and the state-run Chinese Xinhua News Agency reported positively on the Wonsan project.

“We could know that progress is being made in all fields of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] on the way to Wonsan, a coastal city of this country,” North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the flagship legal news source in the country, relayed Xinhua as reporting. “Buildings for the Wonsan-Kalma coastal tourist area under construction have already taken their shapes, and outer design and afforestation and greening are also very unique.”

Xinhua breathlessly reported on Wonsan’s “beautiful beach scenery” and described the project as “world-class.” Concurrently, South Korean media reported that Kim was pressuring the Chinese government to invest in the project, speeding up its completion; it remains unclear if the North Koreans succeeded in attracting any significant amount of Chinese financing.

By the next year, reports from within North Korea indicated that Kim had made the Wonsan resort a major government priority. The website 38 North, which focuses on North Korean issues, reported widespread construction activity in the region, citing satellite evidence. The American-based outlet Radio Free Asia (RFA) also reported rumblings of criticism among Nortk Koreans who denounced that the regime had imposed a “construction” tax on them to fund the project and forced men into construction jobs to finish the work.

The Wuhan coronavirus pandemic appeared to significantly impact the project. Kim made a decision to pivot geopolitically away from China and towards Russia after what he called the country’s “worst-ever situation.” Rumors that the virus had made Kim himself seriously ill and a dramatic weight loss reveal surfaced, accompanied by reports that Kim and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping had drifted apart. Wonsan fell out of international headlines as North Korea banned all foreign entry into China.

Kim lifted the ban on foreigners and restored tourism in August 2024 and less than a year later, the Wonsan resort opened to the public. In a signing of changing political fortunes, the first well-known foreign public figure to visit the site was Lavrov, the Russian top diplomat.

“We hope it will be popular not only with local citizens, but also with Russians,” Lavrov said during his visit, calling it a “good tourist attraction.”

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