West coast · Buan, North Jeolla
채석강
Sedimentary rock stacked like a library of books, walkable at low tide.
Chaeseokgang is not really a swimming beach — it is a shoreline of layered sedimentary cliffs that look like thousands of stacked books, built up over tens of millions of years.
At low tide you can walk along the base of the cliffs and into the sea caves; check the tide table first, because the water comes back.
Beach photograph by Byungjoon Kim, licensed under CC BY 2.0. Shown on the Beaches index; resized.
What else is here
Chaeseokgang is in this list because people look for it among beaches, but it is really a sea cliff: horizontal beds of sedimentary rock cut back by the waves so that the face looks like hundreds of thousands of stacked books.
Low tide only
At low water you can walk out onto the wave-cut platform at the foot of the cliffs and look straight up at the layers. At high water it is underwater. Check the tide table for Gyeokpo before you set off — this is a real hazard, not a scheduling note.
The sand next door
A proper swimming beach immediately beside the cliffs, which is where most people actually spend the afternoon. Sunset over the sea from here is the classic Buan photograph.
Twenty minutes inland
One of the finest temples in the country, founded in 633, approached along an avenue of fir and maple. Its main hall has carved lattice doors left unpainted, which are unlike anything else in Korean Buddhism.
The other cliff
A second, redder set of cliffs a few kilometres north, named after the Red Cliffs of Chinese poetry. Less visited and just as strange.
Byeonsanbando National Park
The rock here was laid down in horizontal beds in a lake basin in the Cretaceous, layer on layer of sediment compacted into stone. The sea has since cut into the edge of it, exposing the beds in section — and because the layers are thin and even, the face reads unmistakably as stacked paper.
The name comes from Caishiji in China, where the poet Li Bai is said to have drowned reaching for the moon's reflection. Korean scholars who had never seen the Chinese site named this one after it.
Everything here runs on the tide. Arrive at high water and there is nothing to see but cliffs from a distance; arrive at low water and you can walk the platform for an hour. The tide comes back across flat rock faster than people expect, so do not lose track of it.
Daecheon Beach
The mud festival beach — and the west coast's biggest stretch of sand.
Eurwangni Beach
Thirty minutes from Incheon Airport — the easiest beach in Korea to reach on a layover.
Kkotji Beach
Two rocks in the surf that the sun sets between — the classic west-coast sunset.