Jeollabukdo’s Gunsan preserves its history from the 1900s. Its buildings that have endured decades of time are established around the streets, recreating the scene of old times. This is why Gunsan is called a city where the present and the history are in harmony, so you feel the passage of time from wooden architecture to tin roofs. For this reason, it is also popular as a filming location. Let’s take a trip to Gunsan full of attractions and food in October, with a cool autumn breeze.

#Tourism
Gunsan’s tourism concept is ‘time travel’. Each year, it holds a festival to look around the time travel village under the theme of ‘Time travel from modernity to the past and the future’. Showing Gunsan’s history from the 1900s to the 1990s, this time travel village has about 10 different buildings for each period. These include: the Gunsan Modern History Museum, Chowon Photo Gallery.

Gunsan is a maritime city. You can meet the sea of Gunsan at the Gogunsan Gundo group of islands, an island cluster consisting of 16 inhabited islands and 47 uninhabited islands. Once an island where you could see the scenery of Gogunsan Gundo at a glance, Sinsido island is a famous tourist attraction with the world’s longest seawall of 33.9km built recently.

Gunsan has pretty photo zones all over. One of them is Gyeongamdong railroad village, which is near the 2.5km-long railway connecting Gunsan Paper Korea Factory and Gunsan Station. Now it is a good photo spot for a memorable trip, as it is decorated with the vibe and atmosphere of the 1980s. The railroad village was also the filming location.

#Food
The food that immediately comes to mind when you think of Gunsan is Jjambbong (Spicy Seafood Noodle Soup). Its ancestor is Chaomamian sold by overseas , who added red chili powder to the noodles to make what is now Jjambbong today. Overseas were banned from owning farmland after the enactment of the Foreign Land Act in 1961, and Gunsan Jjambbong became popular as they opened restaurants. There are more than 100 kinds of Jjambbong because Gunsan is where the sea and land meet and has abundant agricultural and marine products. Currently, Jjambbong Street is established in Jangmi-dong, Gunsan. Jjambbong is an important asset of Gunsan, generating an annual economic revenue effect of KRW 30 billion. After you eat Jjambbong, it’s dessert time. In Gunsan, sweet red bean bread is famous for dessert.

Gunsan’s sweet red bean bread is made with barely hinchalssal, its special product, so it has a thinner skin and is more sticky than ordinary bread. There are always very long lines of people to buy the Gunsan red bean bread at Lee Sung Dang, the oldest bakery in Korea.
 

#Local products
The special product that goes into both ‘Jjambbong ramyeon’ as well as sweet red bean bread is barely hinchalssal. Since it can be used to make traditional foods such as gochujang, it is also called ‘glutinous rice of barley’. Since Hinchassal barely is easy to mix with rice without a separate soaking process and contains 7 times higher soluble fiber than that of regular rice and 3.7 times higher than wheat, it is popular among consumers who are highly interested in health food.

Kokoma Cabbage is also a key agricultural product of Gunsan that is emerging in popularity recently. Gunsan has been cultivating this item as a new income crop since 2018. Kokoma Cabbage is smaller than regular cabbage and has a crunchy texture with a high sugar content, so it has been exported to Japan and Taiwan since the first year of harvest. Kokoma Cabbage is the hero that has helped Gunsan, which was once doing poorly in agricultural product exports, establish as the main production area for horticultural products.