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Seoul is a city with a to-do list. It wakes up already behind, sprints all day, and answers your messages at midnight because it assumes you’re awake too. I love it for this. But two and a half hours south on the KTX — the bullet train that turns the length of a country into an afternoon — there is a Korea that has read the same self-improvement books and quietly declined to finish them. Busan is a city by the sea that is completely comfortable in its own skin. That ease is the whole point, and it is worth the fare.
You feel it the moment the water appears. Busan is not a city with a coastline so much as a coastline that agreed to host a city, draped over hills and around bays with the loose logic of somewhere that grew up around fishing boats rather than boardrooms. Haeundae is the beach everyone knows: a clean crescent of sand backed by towers, the Korean summer at full volume, families and parasols and the particular joy of a very organised nation letting its hair down for exactly one season. Come evening the crowd drifts west to Gwangalli, which is the beach Busan actually loves. Across the bay hangs the Gwangan Bridge, and after dark it lights up in slow washes of colour while the bars and rooftops behind the sand fill with people who have nowhere urgent to be. It is show-off scenery deployed by a city that refuses to show off, and the contradiction is the charm.
Then there are the hills, which is where Busan keeps its older soul. Beomeosa, tucked into the forested slopes of Geumjeongsan, is a working temple with fifteen hundred years of patience in it — worth the climb for the way the traffic simply stops existing halfway up. And on another hillside entirely is Gamcheon, a stacked maze of houses painted in sherbet blues and pinks that the tourism boards insist on calling the Santorini of Korea. It isn’t. It’s better, because it’s real: a former refugee settlement reinvented by artists into something genuinely delightful, murals and alleys and staircases that reward the wanderer over the photographer. The comparison to a Greek island is the kind of thing Busan is too easygoing to correct, though it has every right to.
Gamcheon Culture Village in Busan, Image by Tuleyhcm, Shutterstock
But let’s talk about the food, because Busan would want us to. This is a seafood city in the way that Bordeaux is a wine city — not as a marketing angle but as a founding fact. At Jagalchi, Korea’s largest fish market, the women who run the stalls have been running them for generations, and they will look at your hesitation and decide for you. You point, more or less, at something still moving; it is prepared upstairs and arrives as hoe, the raw fish that Busan treats as a birthright rather than a delicacy. It comes with soju and a great deal of opinion. Down at BIFF Square the register drops to street level: ssiat hotteok, seed-stuffed pancakes fried crisp, eaten standing up in the good-natured crush. And everywhere, the local claim to fame — milmyeon, the wheat cold noodle Busan invented during the war out of what it had, and kept because it turned out to be delicious. A bowl of it in July, chilled and sharp with vinegar, is the most sensible thing you will do all day.
The culture runs deeper than the beach umbrellas suggest. Every autumn the Busan International Film Festival turns the city into the most important cinema event in Asia, and it has left a permanent residue of creative confidence — the Busan Cinema Center’s great cantilevered roof, the film people who never quite left, a design and coffee scene that takes itself seriously in the best way. The Museum of Contemporary Art out on Eulsukdo and the galleries scattered through the newer districts make the case, quietly, that this is a city that makes things and not merely a place that photographs well. Busan has cultural weight. It simply doesn’t lead with it.
The luxury has arrived to match, and it has arrived with taste. The Park Hyatt Busan sits on the marina at Haeundae with the water at its feet and the restraint you’d hope for, all clean sightlines and a bar that understands the assignment at sunset. The Signiel occupies the upper floors of the country’s tallest building, offering the view as the room’s principal furniture. Out at Ananti Cove, the sea and the architecture are staged as a single continuous gesture, a coastal resort complex with a cult bookshop at its heart — which tells you something about the register Busan is aiming for. This is summer-by-the-sea sophistication that doesn’t need to announce itself, because the sea is already doing the announcing.
Gwangalli Beach, Busan, Image by Yevgen Belich, Shutterstock
You can do all of it as an add-on — Seoul for the headline, Busan for the coda, the KTX stitching the two into one clean trip. But the honest World Travel Magazine view is that Busan deserves its own week, and possibly your affection over the capital’s admiration.
Because here is the moment the city gives you, the one you’ll actually keep. It’s near ten on a warm night at Gwangalli. The sand has cooled. Across the bay the bridge begins its slow cycle through the colours, unhurried, entirely for its own amusement. At the stall behind you a plate of hoe lands next to a green bottle of soju, and someone pours without asking. Nobody is performing. Nobody is trying to impress you. And that, of course, is precisely when a place does.
Rachel Owens writes Takeoff, The Host, and The First 48 for World Travel Magazine. She is based in Singapore. She knew the restaurant was overrated before the third star, and she’ll say so nicely. ◼
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© This article was first published online in July 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
