Busan: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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In August 1950 the Korean People’s Army held everything on this peninsula except a rectangle around Busan about a hundred and forty kilometres by ninety. Busan was never captured, it was the provisional capital for most of the war, and its population roughly tripled as refugees arrived by road and by boat. Everything on this walk — the market, the book lane, the staircase — was created by that, within a few hundred metres of the port. Start at Jung-gu station or the 40 Steps, go late morning when the markets are at full volume, and allow three hours because you will stop to eat.

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A short history of Busan

For generations Busan was a small coastal town with a trading post for Japanese merchants. In 1876 Korea was forced to open the port to trade with Japan, and it was the first in the country to open to foreigners. During the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, Busan was the temporary capital, and hundreds of thousands of refugees fled here and built the neighbourhoods on the hillsides. The city is home to the UN Memorial Cemetery, the only cemetery in the world managed by the United Nations. Since 1996 it has hosted one of the largest film festivals in Asia, and the port of Busan is one of the busiest in the world.

The ten best sights in Busan

1
Gamcheon Culture Village
A refugee hillside of 1955, painted as an art project from 2009; go on a weekday morning
2
Huinnyeoul Culture Village
The same story on a sea cliff on Yeongdo, and far less visited; a path runs below the houses
3
UN Memorial Cemetery
The only United Nations cemetery in the world; about 2,300 graves from 11 nations. Free. Verified 10/2026
4
Beomeosa Temple
Founded 678 under the Silla; the Japanese burned it in 1592 and the main hall is the 1614 rebuild
5
Haedong Yonggungsa Temple
One of very few Korean temples built on the sea itself, on the rocks at Gijang; crowded by ten
6
Samgwangsa Temple
Modern and enormous; at Buddha’s birthday in May the courtyards are hung with tens of thousands of lanterns
7
Chungnyeolsa Shrine
For the magistrate who refused to let the Japanese pass through Dongnae in 1592 and died for it
8
Busan Museum
Free; the Korean War rooms are the reason to come and they are not comfortable viewing
9
Busan Modern History Museum
In the 1929 Japanese colonial bank building; free, and it is honest about the occupation
10
Bokcheon Museum
Built over an excavated fourth-century burial mound field; free, and the graves are left open

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A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Busan:

Free walking tours in Busan

The city that did not fall

The 40 Steps · An entirely ordinary staircase between two streets, and the most loaded place in the city. Refugees arriving by sea climbed it to the hill, and because it was the one landmark everyone could name, families who were separated agreed in advance to meet here. There is a bronze figure of a man playing an accordion sitting on the steps, and the museum at the top is one room.
Bosu-dong Book Street · In 1950 a refugee couple from the north laid out secondhand books on the ground in this lane, because students had nothing to study from and books were the one thing that could be resold. It grew to about seventy shops and is still the largest secondhand book quarter in Korea. Ask for English and someone will walk you to the right shop.
Gukje Market · The name means International Market and it is not a boast: it started in 1945 when Japanese colonists leaving Korea sold off what they could not carry, and it grew on American military surplus and aid goods during the war. For decades it was where you went for things that officially did not exist in Korea. It is four blocks of lanes, divided by trade, and the aisles are numbered.
BIFF Square · This was the cinema district, and in 1996 Busan started a film festival here that is now the largest in Asia. The handprints of directors are set into the pavement. The stalls at the entrance sell ssiat hotteok — a sweet pancake split open and stuffed with sunflower and pumpkin seeds, which is a Busan invention and sold almost nowhere else.
Jagalchi Fish Market · Jagal means gravel: the market began on a pebble beach here. After the war it was run almost entirely by women, many of them widows, and the Jagalchi ajumma — the market woman — is a figure in Korean culture the way the Billingsgate porter is in London. Pick a fish on the ground floor and the stall will send it upstairs to be cut; you pay for the fish and a table charge.
Yongdusan Park and Busan Tower · The hill above the old city, reached by an escalator from the street so you do not climb it. During the war the whole hillside was covered in refugee shacks, and in 1954 a fire destroyed them and the park was laid out on the cleared ground. From the tower you can see the port, the two bridges and Yeongdo, which makes it the right place to end and work out what you just walked through.

The two hillsides the refugees built

Both halves of this route are the same thing in two places: a hillside with no water, no road and no permission, built on by people who had nowhere else, and now photographed by everyone. Gamcheon is the famous one and it is busy by eleven; Huinnyeoul is the same story on a sea cliff on Yeongdo and has a fraction of the visitors. The two are about seven kilometres apart. Go to Gamcheon early, take a bus or a taxi across, and do the cliff in the afternoon light. Wear shoes with grip — both are built on slopes of one in four.

Gamcheon main lane · The village was settled in 1955, and not only by refugees: the Taegeukdo religious movement was relocated here by the government, and their adherents built the houses in terraced rows so that no house blocked the one behind it from the sun. That rule is why the hillside looks the way it does, and it was a doctrine, not planning.
The Little Prince viewpoint · The sculpture everyone queues for is from a 2009 government art project called Dreaming of Busan’s Machu Picchu, which paid artists to install work in a district the city expected to demolish. The art is the reason the demolition did not happen. Residents still live here, which is why there are signs in four languages asking you not to photograph through windows.
The lanes below the main street · Two flights down from the photographed route the village is simply a village: laundry, cats, a shop selling one brand of everything, and elderly residents on plastic stools. About two thirds of Gamcheon’s population is over sixty, and the murals end about a hundred metres in any direction from the main lane.
Yeongdo Bridge · Korea’s first drawbridge, built by the Japanese in 1934, and the other agreed meeting point for separated families — the phrase was simply, if we lose each other, Yeongdo Bridge. It still lifts, for fifteen minutes at two o’clock on Saturdays, which is worth timing if your Saturday is free.
Huinnyeoul Culture Village · The name means white water, for the streams that used to run off this cliff into the sea. The houses are one room deep because that is all the ledge allows, and the alleys between them are wide enough for one person. The film Nameless Gangster was shot here, which is the only reason most Koreans know it.
The cliff path below the village · A walkway runs along the foot of the cliff between the houses and the water, and from it you look straight across the channel at the container terminal and the ship repair yards. Busan handles more containers than any port in the world outside China, and this is the one place you can stand at sea level and watch the whole operation.

Igidae and the open sea

Busan has three and a half million people and a coastline that is still mostly rock, because the headlands are too steep to build on. This route runs from the city beach out along one of them to the islands at the river mouth, and it is the best walk in the city by a distance. Do it in the afternoon so the light is behind you, carry water because there is nothing for sale after the first kilometre, and check the forecast — the path is exposed and it closes in a typhoon warning.

Gwangalli Beach · The beach the city itself uses, as opposed to Haeundae, which is the beach the country uses. The sand here was imported and is replenished, because the bay silted up when the bridge was built. On some weekend evenings a drone show of several hundred machines runs over the water, free, and the schedule is published a month ahead.
Gwangan Bridge · Seven and a half kilometres long on two decks, opened in 2003, and it carries traffic in one direction on each level — so the view you get depends on which way you are driving. It is lit in changing colour schemes every night and a different one on Saturdays, and the lighting is why the beach behind it became a restaurant district.
Millak raw fish town · A block of multi-storey buildings where every floor is sashimi halls. The system is specific: you choose a live fish from the tanks on the ground floor, pay by weight, and carry it up to a table where they charge you a per-person seating fee and bring the side dishes. Nobody will explain this in English and the price is almost always clearer than it looks.
Yongho-dong waterfront · The residential strip between the beach and the headland, and the start of the coastal path. Until the 1990s this was a fishing settlement with a tuna cannery; the apartment towers went up on the cannery sites and the old sea wall is still underneath the promenade.
Igidae · Four kilometres of rock shelf, suspension bridges and boardwalk round the headland, with the whole Haeundae skyline across the water. The name is said to come from two courtesans who, during the 1592 Japanese invasion, got an enemy general drunk on this rock and went into the sea with him. The story is traditional rather than documented, and the local plaque says so.
Oryukdo Skywalk · Oryukdo means five-six islands, because at high tide two of the rocks join and you count five, and at low tide you count six. The skywalk is a horseshoe of glass floor cantilevered off the cliff; it is free, they hand out shoe covers, and this is the official eastern end of the Korea Strait and the western end of the Sea of Japan.

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Getting to Busan and getting around

Gimhae International Airport · Eighteen kilometres west; the light rail from the terminal links to the metro in twenty minutes
Busan Station · Seoul in two hours and twenty minutes on the KTX; the station is in the old city, not the beach
International Passenger Terminal · Ferries to Fukuoka and Osaka; the fast boat to Japan takes three and a half hours
Seomyeon Station · Lines 1 and 2 cross here and this is the real centre of the city, not Nampo or Haeundae
Haeundae Station · Line 2, and the beach is a seven-minute walk through the market from exit five
Nampo Station · Line 1 under the old centre; the fish market, the film square and the book street are all here
Nopo Bus Terminal · The intercity coaches, at the far north end of line 1; Gyeongju in an hour

Cheap eats in Busan

Busan has the most distinctive food of any Korean city, and nearly all of it was invented between 1950 and 1953. A city of four hundred thousand took in over a million refugees, almost all from the north, and the kitchens that resulted were improvisations: wheat flour from American aid instead of buckwheat, pork bones nobody else wanted, fish the market could not sell. Those improvisations are now the city’s signature dishes and are still sold from counters rather than restaurants. Five to twelve thousand won a bowl, four to nine dollars, and almost everywhere takes cards. One rule: a shop with the dish name and nothing else on the sign is better than a shop with a menu.

Dwaeji gukbap · Pork bone broth with rice, and the city’s own dish; six dollars and eaten at any hour
Milmyeon · Cold wheat noodles in iced broth, invented here in the war; five dollars and a summer dish
Busan eomuk · Fried fish cake, sold by the piece from a steaming tray; a dollar or two and the city is the centre of it
Ssiat hotteok · A fried sweet pancake split open and packed with seeds; a dollar, and it was invented at this square
Dongnae pajeon · A thick scallion and seafood pancake with a rice-flour batter; eight dollars and shared
Kkomjangeo gui · Grilled hagfish on the Jagalchi pavement; ten dollars, and it is still alive when ordered
Bibim dangmyeon · Cold sweet-potato noodles in chilli sauce from a market cart; two dollars
Sea squirt and gizzard shad · Two seasonal things: sea squirt in spring, gizzard shad in autumn, both raw and both local
Momos Coffee, Geumjeong · The roastery whose barista won the world championship in 2019 — the first Korean to. Verified 10/2026

Museums in Busan

Busan’s museums are almost all free and almost all about the same three subjects: the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and the port. That is not a shortage of imagination — the city’s whole modern identity is those three things, and a place that was the provisional capital during the worst years of the war keeps its records. Two of the museums are built on top of what they describe: one over an excavated burial field, one inside a colonial bank.

UN Memorial Cemetery · Free; the only United Nations cemetery in the world, about 2,300 graves in 22 national plots
Busan Museum · Free; two halls, and the second is the occupation and the war told without softening
Busan Modern History Museum · Free, in the 1929 Oriental Development Company building, which was the instrument of the land seizures
Bokcheon Museum · Free; a fourth-century burial mound field with some of the graves left open under glass
Busan Museum of Art · Free permanent collection; the Lee Ufan Space beside it is a separate building for one artist
Busan Cinema Center · The Guinness record for longest cantilever roof: 85 metres unsupported, 163 metres long. Verified 10/2026
Nurimaru APEC House · Free; the 2005 summit building on Dongbaek Island, with the table left as it was
Busan National Science Museum · Twenty kilometres east at Gijang; built around shipbuilding, cars, nuclear power and chips

Holy places in Busan

Korean Buddhism is a mountain religion: when Confucian scholars ran the Joseon state for five hundred years the temples were pushed out of the cities and up into the hills, and that is why the great ones here are all at the end of a bus ride and a climb. Busan has two of the country’s important temples and one that is not important at all but sits on the sea, which is why everyone goes to it. All three are free. Take socks — you remove shoes to enter a hall.

Beomeosa Temple · Founded 678 under the Silla; the three-storey gate and the 1614 main hall are the originals here
Haedong Yonggungsa · Founded 1376 and one of very few Korean temples on the sea itself; go at seven or skip it
Samgwangsa Temple · Modern, huge, and at Buddha’s birthday in May the courtyards are roofed in paper lanterns
Chungnyeolsa Shrine · A Confucian shrine, not Buddhist, for the men who refused to let the Japanese through in 1592
Jukseong chapel, Gijang · A stone church on a headland that was built as a television set in 2009 and is not a church
Geumjeongsanseong Fortress · Eighteen kilometres of wall, the largest mountain fortress in Korea, rebuilt 1703 after the invasions
Dongnae Eupseong · The wall of the inland town the port grew out of; a three-kilometre ridge walk along it

Nature and day trips near Busan

Busan is built on hills that run straight into the sea, which is why the city sprawls for forty kilometres along the coast instead of spreading inland, and why it has more public coastal path than any city in Korea. Nearly all of it is free and signposted, and most of it is nearly empty on a weekday. The one thing to check is the weather: typhoon season runs roughly July to September and the coastal paths close under warning, not as advice but with gates.

Igidae Coastal Walk · Four kilometres of rock shelf and suspension bridge facing the skyline; the best walk in the city
Taejongdae · Sea cliffs and a lighthouse at the tip of Yeongdo; a road train loops it for a few dollars
Geumjeongsan · The 800-metre mountain behind the city; a cable car part way and the fortress wall along the ridge
Hwangnyeongsan · 427 metres in the middle of the city; a bus runs near the top and the night view is the best here
Amnam Park · A cliff path west of Songdo that was a closed military zone until 1996; rock bridges and no crowd
Dongbaek Island · Not an island since the sand filled in; a 1.5-kilometre shaded loop at the end of Haeundae
Oncheoncheon Stream Park · A covered-over stream reopened as a linear park; the city cycles and runs along it for kilometres
Busan Citizens Park · A Japanese army base, then a US camp until 2010, now a park that marks both on site
Dalmaji Hill and Moontan Road · A pine ridge above Haeundae with a walking trail named for moon-watching, and cafés at the top

Things to do in Busan with kids

Busan is a beach city with four metro lines, which makes it one of the easier Asian cities to do with children: the sand is public and free, the trains have lifts at nearly every station, and the two glass skywalks and the beach train are the kind of thing that works for an eight-year-old and an eighty-year-old at once. The season matters more than anything — the beaches are supervised in July and August and simply empty the rest of the year.

Haeundae Blueline Park beach train · The old coastal railway reopened in 2020 as an open-sided train along the sea; book the sky capsule ahead
Songdo cable car and skywalk · Glass-floor cabins across the bay, and a 365-metre walkway out to a rock. Verified 10/2026
Oryukdo Skywalk · Free glass floor over the sea with shoe covers handed out; the five-or-six island count is the game
Sea Life Busan Aquarium · Under the Haeundae beachfront; the indoor answer to a typhoon afternoon
Haeundae Beach · Supervised and equipped in July and August; parasols and rings for hire by the hour
Busan Citizens Park · Free; big lawns, a water play area in summer and the only real shade in the middle of the city
Busan National Science Museum · Built around Korean industry and hands-on throughout; twenty kilometres east and worth the trip
Hurshimchung bathhouse · Real thermal water at Dongnae, used since the Silla period; a jjimjilbang with family areas

Nightlife in Busan

Busan drinks in three separate places and they do not mix. Seomyeon is where the city itself goes — a grid of basements and tent bars around the metro crossing, loud and cheap and Korean. Gwangalli is where you go to look at the lit bridge from a rooftop. Haeundae is where the visitors are, and it is the most expensive. Soju is about two dollars a bottle in a shop and four in a bar, and the thing to know is that a Korean bar almost always requires you to order food with the drinks — the anju is not optional and it is how the place makes money.

Seomyeon · The real nightlife grid, around the line 1 and 2 crossing; basements, tent bars and no visitors
Gwangalli rooftops · The strip faces the lit bridge; a drink buys the view and the prices reflect that honestly
Jeonpo Cafe Street · Metal workshops that became bars and coffee roasters; the old shop signs were deliberately left up
Millak raw fish town at night · Sashimi halls with soju until late and the bridge out of every window; the per-table charge is standard
Jagalchi alley at ten at night · The grill stalls outside the hall are a night thing, not a day one; hagfish, soju and plastic stools
Gwangalli drone show · Several hundred drones over the water on some weekend evenings; free, and the schedule is published ahead

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Frequently asked questions about Busan

What is there to see in Busan?

The top sights in Busan are Gamcheon Culture Village, Huinnyeoul Culture Village and UN Memorial Cemetery. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Busan?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Busan without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Busan?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Busan, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The city that did not fall.

How do you get to Busan and get around?

The main ways are Gimhae International Airport, Busan Station and International Passenger Terminal. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Busan, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Busan that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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