Inspired by the architecture of the Spanish tourist resort
A new resort on the eastern coast of North Korea, criticized by human rights groups for the hard treatment reserved for construction workers, welcomed its first group of Russian tourists this week.
The BBC reports it.
The Wonsan Kalma resort was inaugurated last month with a great ceremony by the North Korean leader Kim Jong Una, who called him a “tourist and cultural destination of the world -class”.
The details on the construction of this resort were wrapped in mystery in a country largely closed to the outside world.
Kim Jong Uno spent most of his youth in Wonsan and, before the construction of the new resort, the city was a popular tourist destination for the country’s elite. “When the tourist area of Wonsan was initially designed, the idea was to attract about a million tourists in the area, however maintaining it a closed area,” says Ri Jong Ho, a high North Korean economic official involved in the early stages of planning the resort and which deserted in 2014. In 2017, a year before the start of the works, Kim sent a delegation to Spain for a cognitive mission, where the team visited the tourist resort Benidorm. The North Korean delegation “included high -ranking politicians and many architects who took many notes”, recalls Matias Perez Such, a member of the Spanish team that hosted the delegation during a tour that included a themed park, luxury hotels and a tourist port.
In a North Korean booklet with a map of the resort, 43 hotels along the beach are indicated, as well as other hotels located on an artificial lake and campsites.
A water park, equipped with imposing yellow slides, is located far from the beach. Further north, there is a neighborhood dedicated to entertainment that includes buildings identified in the plan such as a theater, recreational centers and fitness and a cinema.
