Gyeongnam highlights

Gyeongnam wraps around Busan on three sides, a run of harbour towns, islands and old fortress cities that each make an easy day trip or an unhurried overnight. Express buses from Busan reach most of them in one to two hours, so you can take in one or two and still keep a bed in the city.

The stops below run roughly from the coast inland, in the order the buses make easiest. As everywhere on this site, the food is left to each town’s full local list rather than a single name.

Tongyeong — the harbour town

Tongyeong is the pick of the coast, sometimes called the Naples of Korea for the way its painted houses climb the slope above a working fishing port. The Dongpirang mural village runs up one of those slopes to a lookout over the harbour, and the Jungang market spreads along the water below, half fish stalls and half street food.

A cable car climbs Mireuksan for a wide view over the Hallyeosudo, the scatter of islands filling the sea to the south, and from the passenger terminal ferries run out to Hansando, where Admiral Yi Sun-sin won his most famous naval battle. The town is known for oysters, chungmu gimbap and sweet honey bread.

Geoje — the island coast

Geoje, Korea’s second-largest island, mixes big shipyards with genuine resort scenery. A short boat from the eastern coast reaches Oedo, a small island landscaped into a terraced garden, while Windy Hill’s grassy slope and the pebble beach at Hakdong sit along the way.

It is more a place to slow down than to tick sights off, and easy to fold into a Tongyeong trip. You can cross by bus over the bridges from Tongyeong, or come straight from Busan on the Geoga Bridge, which leaps island to island across the mouth of the bay.

Jinju — fortress and river

Inland, Jinju gathers around a fortress on a bluff above the Nam river, with the Chokseongnu pavilion looking out over the water and a compact old centre that makes an easy half-day on foot. Its own full guide is here on the site if you want the day in detail.

The city is best known for its October lantern festival, when the river fills with light, and for a refined local table — its own bibimbap and cold noodles. Even off-season the fortress and riverbank are worth the ride.

Further afield

Two more reward the longer trip. Namhae, a green island county to the southwest, is laced with quiet coast: the hillside German Village, built by Koreans who worked in Germany in the 1960s and came home, and the Darangyi rice terraces that step down to the sea at Gacheon.

Inland from there, Hapcheon holds Haeinsa, the mountain temple that has kept the eighty thousand woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana for some six hundred years. Both are better as an overnight than a rushed day, and both sit at the edge of what you can reach from Busan.