Temples & history

The region holds some of Korea’s most important temples and its oldest recorded history — a temple built onto the sea rocks, mountain monasteries older than a thousand years, and the tombs of a kingdom that came before the more famous ones further north. Most are within reach of public transport or a short bus, and this guide gathers them into a single thread rather than a fixed route.

None of it needs to be rushed. Pick the ones that fit your days: a single mountain temple, walked slowly, can fill a calm half-day on its own.

Temples around Busan

Two temples near the city make the easiest start, and they could hardly be more different. In the north, Beomeosa climbs the wooded slopes of Geumjeongsan in a series of old halls and stone terraces — founded in the seventh century and still one of Korea’s principal Seon, or Zen, temples, reached by Line 1 to Beomeosa station and a short bus up the mountain.

On the east coast in Gijang, Haedong Yonggungsa is the rarer sight: a temple built right at the water’s edge instead of up a valley, its halls set among the rocks above the surf and reached by a long stair down through a gate of stone lanterns. Come at dawn, when the sun rises straight out of the sea behind it.

The great mountain temples

Two of Korea’s ‘three jewel’ temples — each standing for one of the treasures of Buddhism — sit within reach in Gyeongnam. North of Busan in Yangsan, Tongdosa represents the Buddha himself: founded in 646 to enshrine his relics, it keeps no Buddha statue in its main hall, since the relics are held behind it, and it is one of the mountain monasteries added to the UNESCO list in 2018.

Deeper inland, at Hapcheon, Haeinsa stands for the Buddhist teaching, and it guards the Tripitaka Koreana — over eighty thousand woodblocks carved in the thirteenth century with the whole of the Buddhist canon. They have survived some seven hundred years in a pair of plain wooden halls, built and sited so precisely for airflow that the blocks have never warped.

Ancient kingdoms

The region’s history runs older still. Long before the kingdoms that shaped most of Korea, Gimhae was the seat of Geumgwan Gaya, a confederacy that worked iron and traded by sea; the tomb of its founding king and a good national museum still sit at the centre of the modern city.

Jinju’s riverside fortress adds a later chapter, from the wars of the sixteenth century, and the seaside temple at Gijang a spiritual one — so that, taken together, the region reads almost as a timeline you can travel by bus.