West coast · Boryeong, South Chungcheong
대천해수욕장
The mud festival beach — and the west coast's biggest stretch of sand.
Daecheon is the largest beach on the west coast and the reason a lot of foreign visitors end up in Boryeong: the Boryeong Mud Festival takes it over for two weeks in July.
Outside the festival it is a wide, shallow, gently shelving beach with a long promenade, and the west-coast sunsets are the draw.
The Sky Bike is the other thing people come for — a pedal-powered rail car on a track built out over the sea at the southern end, which is a strange and very pleasant way to spend half an hour.
What else is here
Daecheon is a long, flat, grey-sand beach that is pleasant enough for fifty weeks of the year and completely transformed for the other two, when the Boryeong Mud Festival takes it over.
Mid-to-late July
Mud pools, mud slides, mud wrestling and concerts, using mineral-rich mud dug from the flats along this coast. It started in 1998 as a marketing exercise for Boryeong cosmetics and became the best-known festival in Korea among foreign visitors. Expect enormous crowds and book accommodation months out.
Paid pitches behind the beach
There is a campsite on the beach with car pitches — roughly ₩5,000 a day for a small vehicle and ₩10,000 for a large one, plus showers, changing rooms and a cooking area. Very large tents are not permitted. Check current rates before travelling.
Out of festival season
The permanent mud experience centre runs year-round, and there is a seafront skywalk with a glass section at the northern end of the beach.
Islands off the coast
Ferries run from Daecheon port to a scatter of small islands — Sapsido is the easy one, forty minutes out, with quiet beaches and a handful of guesthouses.
The west coast
The west coast is not the east coast. The sand is greyer and finer, the water is shallower and murkier with silt, and the tidal range is enormous — the sea can go out several hundred metres. What it gives you in return is water that is genuinely warm by August and sunsets straight out over the sea, which the east coast cannot do.
Daecheon is the biggest and best-organised of the west-coast beaches, about three and a half kilometres long with a full seafront of hotels, restaurants and arcades behind it. Boryeong is a straightforward two hours or so from Seoul.
If you are coming for the mud festival, understand what you are signing up for: it is a genuinely large, loud, crowded event aimed squarely at people in their twenties, and Daecheon in mid-July bears no resemblance to Daecheon in September.
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.
Sinduri Beach & Dunes
The largest coastal sand dunes in Korea, protected behind the beach.