North Korea set to open 'world class' tourist resort on July 1

 North Korea has completed construction on a massive tourist resort boasting colourful water slides and swimming pools, state media said on Thursday, a pet project of leader Kim Jong Un.

Kim was an enthusiastic visitor this week to the sprawling site on the isolated country's east coast, which is set to open its doors on July 1 to domestic tourists and maybe one day foreign ones.

Analysts have said Kim showed a keen interest in developing North Korea's tourism industry in his early years in power, with the development of the Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Area known to be a key focal point.

The nuclear-armed North reopened its borders in August 2023 after almost four years, having closed them because of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which time even its own nationals were prevented from entering.

Foreign tourism was limited though even before the pandemic, with tour companies saying around 5,000 Western tourists visited each year.

Kim on Tuesday attended a lavish inaugural ceremony for the tourist zone, which hosts accommodation for nearly 20,000 people and what Pyongyang claims is "a world-class cultural resort," the Korean Central News Agency said.

Photos released by state media showed him sitting in a chair watching a man flying off a water slide and wearing a suit at the beach.

Wonsan Kalma houses "sea-bathing service facilities, various sports and recreation facilities" and is "equipped with all conditions... for providing the beauty of the scenic spot on the east coast in all seasons", according to KCNA.

Kim, with "great satisfaction", said the construction of the site would go down as "one of the greatest successes this year" and that the North would build more large-scale tourist zones "in the shortest time possible", it added.

Kim was joined by his daughter, Ju Ae — considered by many experts to be his likely successor — and his wife, Ri Sol Ju.

South Korean media reported, based on images released by Pyongyang, that Ju Ae appears to be wearing a Cartier watch — despite such a high-end item being banned from import into North Korea under UN sanctions, imposed in response to the country's nuclear and missile activities.

The North last year permitted Russian tourists — Pyongyang has close ties with Moscow — to return for the first time since Covid and Western tour operators returned in February this year.

Russia's Tass news agency on Wednesday reported that a passenger train from Pyongyang had arrived in Moscow, marking the reopening of the direct rail route between the allies' capitals after a five-year suspension.

A tourist train between Rason — home to North Korea's first legal marketplace — and Russia's Vladivostok resumed in May this year, according to an official from Seoul's unification ministry.

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% 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.

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.

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.

Agence France-Presse