North Korea will open its biggest tourist site next week, though it’s not yet welcoming foreigners

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, along with his wife and daughter, celebrates the opening of a beach resort without any tourists.

SEOUL, South Korea -- 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 to foreign visitors.

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

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

Kim said its construction would be recorded as “one of the greatest successes this year” and called the site “the proud first step” toward realizing the government’s policy of developing tourism, according to KCNA.

North Korea will open the site to domestic tourists first

The Wonsan-Kalma beach resort is North Korea’s biggest tourist site. KCNA said North Korea will begin service for domestic tourists next Tuesday. It didn’t say when North Korea will start receiving foreign tourists, but Russian officials said later Thursday that the first Russian tour to the site will happen in July.

Observers say the resort likely required a huge investment from North Korea’s limited budget, so it eventually will have to accept Chinese and other foreign tourists too to break even.

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.

But North Korea hasn’t fully lifted a ban on foreign tourists that it imposed in early 2020 to guard against the COVID-19 pandemic. 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.

Russian tourists expected soon

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

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

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

Kim’s recent foreign policy prioritizes relations with Russia as he’s been supplying troops and conventional weapons to support its war against Ukraine in return for economic and military assistance. But North Korea’s ties with China, which has long been its biggest trading partner and aid benefactor, have apparently cooled as China is reluctant to join an anti-Western alliance with North Korea and Russia, analysts say.

Tuesday’s ceremony that marked the completion of the resort’s construction drew the Russian ambassador to North Korea and his embassy staff, KCNA said. But it didn’t say whether any Chinese diplomats were also invited.

“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 Sangkeun, an expert at the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank run by South Korea’s intelligence agency.

Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, also said that foreign tourism to the Wonsan-Kalma site will begin with Russians. But he said Chinese tours to the zone, a sort of civilian exchange, will also begin soon, adding bilateral trade between China and North Korea has been recovering.

South Korean and American tours won’t likely happen soon

Lim said that South Korean and American tours to North Korea won’t likely restart 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.

North Korea hasn’t publicly responded to Trump’s outreach. It has repeatedly rejected Washington and Seoul’s dialogue offers and focused on expanding its nuclear weapons program since Kim’s high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with Trump collapsed in 2019.

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By Hyung-jin Kim

Associated Press writer Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England, contributed to this report.