[Digging Travel] In Bonghwa, Things That Came from Afar Find a Home

Amur Tigers and Wild Plant Seeds, Santa from Northern Europe, and Memories of Vietnamese Royalty
A New Place to Stay in Buncheon for Day-Trippers...
Now, Night Falls Between Bonghwa's Scattered Attractions

On July 25, at the National Baekdudaegan Arboretum in Bonghwa, North Gyeongsang Province, a Baekdusan tiger named Mireung stood before visitors for the first time. This came after she spent time adapting to her new forest home since arriving last October. Just two days earlier, Santa Fore Resort opened in Bunchon, a few mountain ridges away. One became a new sanctuary for an endangered species; the other, a new resting place for travelers. In Bonghwa, it is strangely common for “arrivals” to make the news.

Mugung the Tiger at the National Baekdudaegan Arboretum. National Baekdudaegan Arboretum

Bonghwa is often described as a remote place. Its mountains are high, and tourist attractions are scattered between the peaks. When you leave one place for the next, you have to set the new destination in your GPS all over again. Yet, upon visiting, Bonghwa feels less like a mountain village isolated from the world and more like a place where things from afar have found their place. Tigers and seeds have entered the forest, and Santa has stepped down at a small train station. Even memories of a royal family that left Vietnam 800 years ago still draw tourists from their homeland.

A Forest That Welcomed What Might Disappear First

In the Tiger Forest of the National Baekdudaegan Arboretum, people wait for the tiger to appear. After watching the forest long enough for leaves and shadows to blur together, the stripes begin to move. The tiger does not hurry for the visitors. It is people who must adjust to the tiger’s own clock.

Mireung, the newcomer, was also given this time. Instead of being displayed immediately, she was introduced only after she had adjusted to her new environment. The Tiger Forest is not simply a place to exhibit a predator, but a sanctuary temporarily holding memories of the wilderness lost from the Korean Peninsula.

Deeper in the arboretum, even quieter life resides. The Baekdudaegan Global Seed Vault is a storage facility that preserves wild plant seeds for extended periods. In a place where no flowers bloom and no leaves rustle, plants quietly await the future in the form of small seeds. If the arboretum displays the present forest, the seed vault prepares for forests that may be needed after future disasters yet to come. Next to the gardens welcoming visitors, storage bunkers have been constructed, so the seeds can survive even without human attention.

A panoramic view of the Rainbow Garden by the Landscape Garden Team at the National Baekdudaegan Arboretum. National Baekdudaegan Arboretum

The first things that Bonghwa offered a place were not tourists, but things that might disappear. It gave the tiger a forest to walk in and seeds the darkness to endure until the day they awaken.

At the Forest Healing Center beneath Mt. Munsu, this time it is people themselves who are momentarily preserved. Before entering the forest, visitors check their physical condition with body scan devices, reviewing their blood pressure, body composition, and stress level in numerical form. The vague sense of “somehow feeling tired” transforms into measurable numbers.

What the body does next is simple. You soak your feet in warm water, walk forest paths, and lie down in an outdoor hammock. As you immerse your feet, their temperature rises, and lying in a hammock slowly sways with your weight. Though “forest healing” is a grand phrase, the verbs it contains are humble: checking, soaking, lying down, catching your breath.

Bonghwa’s forests do not promise instant health. Instead, they prompt you to check on the body you normally ignore and allow unstructured, uneventful time. Just as the seed vault does not rush seeds to sprout, the forest does not push people to recover quickly.

Children are posing in front of the Santa sculpture at Bunchon Station's Summer Santa Village. Korail

A Small Station Where Santa Arrived

Upon arriving at Bunchon Station, you may find the seasons momentarily confusing. In the heart of summer’s green, Santa in a red suit, a giant tree, and gift boxes stand together. Santa, born in Northern Europe, took up residence in this tiny railway village of Bonghwa in 2014, inspired by Rovaniemi Santa Village in Finland. By merging the Baekdudaegan Mountain Range Valley Train stop with a Christmas story, the declining village received a new role.

It is not easy to say that Santa fits naturally in Bunchon. The snowy plains of Finland and the mountain valleys of Bonghwa are distant both geographically and historically. Yet, tourism is not always about finding what originally existed, but rather, creating plausible connections between unfamiliar things and the locality. The Santa in Bunchon survived not by perfectly replicating Northern Europe, but by finding a home in the excitement of train travel to a mountain village, and in the snows that occasionally blanket the town in winter.

Problems started after that. Travelers who took photos with Santa and stepped off the valley train had to leave before nightfall—not due to a lack of sights, but because there were few places to stay for the next part of their journey.

A view of Santa Fore Resort in Bonghwa County, newly opened last July. Travel Team

Santa Fore Resort, which opened on July 23, filled that gap. Although it was created by renovating the former Bunchon Elementary School, there is no need to search for classroom remnants. Unless told, one would find it hard to imagine it had ever been a school, as the interior is now a full-fledged accommodation facility. It offers 15 guest rooms, four animal-shaped caravans, a cafe, dining spaces, a conference room, and a business lounge.

They did not leave blackboards and desks behind to profit from nostalgia for closed schools. Instead, they provided what Bonghwa needs most now in this space—a place to sleep.

Nineteen lodging spots do not resolve all accommodation challenges in Bonghwa. Still, the timetable of Bunchon travel has changed. After taking photos with Santa and stepping off the train, visitors no longer have to leave immediately for another city—they can now have dinner, stay overnight, and visit the arboretum or Mt. Cheongnyang the next day.

One place to stay did not create another tourist attraction; instead, it placed night between the scattered destinations.

Statue of Ly Taozo (Ly Cong Uan, 974–1028), founder of the first unified dynasty in Vietnam, erected in Chunghyodang, Bongseong-myeon, Bonghwa-gun, Gyeongbuk Province. Travel team

Vietnamese Returned After 800 Years

Arriving at Chunghyodang in Bongseong-myeon, the focus of Bonghwa travel suddenly shifts to Vietnam. Here lies the history of the Hwasan Yi clan, beginning with Lee Yong-sang of Vietnam’s Ly royal family. Descendants of Lee Yong-sang, who left Vietnam in the 13th century and settled in Goryeo, built homes throughout the Andong and Bonghwa areas. Chunghyodang honors the loyalty and filial piety of Lee Jang-bal, a descendant who died at the Battle of Mungyeong during the Imjin War.

However, Chunghyodang is not merely an old house preserving stories from family registries. According to staff on site, about 1,000 Vietnamese tourists visit here monthly. Chunghyodang and the nearby K-Vietnam Valley are now part of the actual itineraries for Vietnamese group tourists to Korea. Today’s Vietnamese return all the way to Bonghwa to listen to legends of their royal ancestors who once left for foreign lands.

The process is the reverse of those hastily crafted narratives often produced by local governments to attract foreign visitors. Here, exile and settlement happened eight centuries ago, and today’s tourism follows those memories. Rather than merely commodifying history, the history itself paved a path for actual tourism.

Thus, Vietnamese spoken in front of Chunghyodang is not mere background sound. The stories on statues and signboards now ring in the present tense. Centuries after a royal descendant settled in a foreign land, people from his homeland retrace those footsteps. Bonghwa may be a mountain village distant from the world, but the distance to the global visitors here is much closer than one would think.

Bonghwa’s tourist resources are not easily wrapped up in a single sentence. What could link the Baekdusan tiger, wild plant seeds, Santa from Finland, and descendants of Vietnamese royalty? Yet, by journey’s end, a common thread emerges.

Bonghwa did not stop at displaying exotic things. It gave the tiger a forest, the seeds their time. Santa was granted a new role for a fading station, and the memory of Vietnamese royalty was given a pathway for their homeland’s people to return. What was missing for visitors was a place to stay at the end of that path.

At night, Bunchon Village was astonishingly quiet. It was unlike the emptiness of deserted tourist spots. As voices faded around the Santa sculpture and the valley train during the day, the village’s original stillness returned between mountains and train tracks. It was time when there was no need to look for what more to see.

For day-trippers, this silence was never granted. They had to calculate the time for the last train and their return journey ahead of everything else. The opening of Santa Fore has not shortened the distance to Bonghwa. Yet, at the end of that long journey, there is now a place for a night’s stay.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.