North Korea's Benidorm-style resort welcomes first Russian tourists
Echoes of Benidorm
Kim Jong Un spent much of his youth in Wonsan, and prior to the building of the new resort the town was a popular holiday destination for the country's elite.
"When the Wonsan tourist area was initially planned… the idea was to attract around one million tourists to the area while keeping it a closed-off zone," says Ri Jong Ho, a senior North Korean economic official involved in the resort's early planning stages and who defected in 2014."The intention was to open North Korea up a bit."In 2017, a year before construction began, Kim sent a delegation on a fact-finding mission to Spain, where the team toured the resort of Benidorm.The North Korean delegation "included high ranking politicians and many architects who took lots of notes," recalls Matias Perez Such, a member of the Spanish team that hosted the delegation on a tour including a theme park, high-rise hotels and a marina.A North Korean brochure with a map of the resort has 43 hotels identified along the beach front, as well as guest houses on an artificial lake, and camping sites. We've matched these locations with high-resolution satellite imagery, although we are unable to verify whether they have actually been completed.
An aquatic park, complete with towering yellow water slides, is set back from the beach.Further north, there's an entertainment quarter which includes buildings that are identified in the plan as a theatre, recreation and fitness centres, and a cinema.
Beginning in early 2018, satellite images taken over 18 months reveal dozens of buildings springing up along the 4km (2.5 mile) stretch of coastline.By the end of 2018, around 80% of the resort had been completed, according to research carried out by satellite imagery firm, SI Analytics, based in South Korea.However, following this whirlwind construction effort, work on the site then appears to have paused.
Construction then resumed after a June 2024 meeting with Kim and Vladimir Putin, where the Russian president said he would encourage his citizens to visit North Korea's holiday resorts.
The human cost of construction
This rapid pace of construction has raised concerns over the treatment of those working at the site.The UN has highlighted a system of forced labour used in North Korea, in particular "shock brigades" where workers often face harsh conditions, long hours, and inadequate compensation.James Heenan of the UN Human Rights Office in Seoul says "there are reports that the resort was built using what they call shock brigades"."We've also seen reports that people were working 24 hours at the end to get this thing finished, which sounds like a shock brigade to me."
The BBC has spoken to one North Korean who served in and eventually managed shock brigades.Although Cho Chung Hui - who has subsequently defected - wasn't involved in the construction of the Wonsan resort, he recalled the brutal conditions of the brigades he oversaw."The principle behind these [brigades] was that no matter what, you had to complete the task, even if it cost you your life," he said."I saw many women who were under so much physical strain and eating so poorly that their periods stopped altogether."
Kang Gyuri, who worked in Wonsan before fleeing to South Korea in 2023, says her cousin volunteered to work on the construction site because he saw it as a pathway to residency in the country's capital of Pyongyang, which is reserved for citizens trusted by the regime."He could hardly sleep. They [didn't] give him enough to eat," she said."The facilities are not properly organised, some people just die while working and they [the authorities] don't take responsibility if they fall and die."Ms Kang also said residents in Wonsan were driven out from their homes as the resort project expanded, often without compensation.Though not specific to Ms Kang's experience, BBC Verify was able to identify through satellite analysis the demolition of buildings near a main road leading towards the resort. In their place, larger tower blocks are now visible.
"They just demolish everything and build something new, especially if it's in a good location," Ms Kang said."The problem is, no matter how unfair it feels, people can't openly speak out or protest."The BBC reached out to North Korean officials for comment.
Where are the foreign tourists?
North Korea has been almost entirely closed to foreign visitors with only a few highly-controlled tours permitted to visit the country in recent years.Wonsan Kalma is seen not only as playing an important role in reviving the sanctioned country's ailing economic fortunes, but also as a means of strengthening its ties with Russia - which have grown closer following Pyongyang's military support for Moscow's war in Ukraine.According to early planning documents seen by BBC Verify, the initial goal was to attract more than a million visitors, with foreign tourists expected to mainly come from China and Russia.
We have scanned tourist agency sites both in China and Russia for any listings promoting trips to the new resort.None of the Chinese agencies we checked were advertising trips to Wonsan. In Russia, however, we identified three agencies offering tours that included Wonsan Kalma.We called one of the Russian agencies in early July posing as an interested customer a week before its first scheduled departure on 7 July and were told that it had attracted 12 people from Russia.The week-long trip to North Korea, including three days at the Wonsan resort, cost $1,800 (£1,300) - that's 60% more than the average monthly salary in Russia.Two further trips have been scheduled for August, according to this tour operator.
We contacted the other two agencies offering similar tour packages, but they declined to disclose how many people had signed up.Andrei Lankov, an expert in Russian-North Korean relations at the Kookmin University in Seoul, said Wonsan Kalma was "highly unlikely to become seriously popular with Russian visitors"."Russian tourists can easily go to places like Turkey, Egypt, Thailand and Vietnam, which are far superior to everything North Korea can develop," he said."The standards of service are higher and you are not put under constant supervision."Additional reporting by Yaroslava Kiryukhina, Yi Ma and Cristina Cuevas. Graphics by Sally Nicholls and Erwan Rivault.
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The Guardian
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Artist or activist? For Juliet Stevenson and her husband, Gaza leaves them with no choice
Read any celebrity-signed open letter advocating for social justice over the past few years and you'll probably spot Juliet Stevenson's name. When the veteran actor is not gracing screens or on a stage somewhere, she's out on the streets brandishing a placard or giving speeches about human rights, gender equality and the Palestinian right to self-determination. Just last month, she wrote in the Guardian about the British government's 'complicity' in the Gaza atrocities and what she called an attempt to repress civil liberties by proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Critics may – and they do – disparage Stevenson as a 'luvvie' engaging in typical performative liberal politics, but spend just a few minutes with the actor and her husband – the anthropologist, film-maker and writer Hugh Brody – and you quickly discover that the roots of their activism run far deeper than that. 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She came from an Austro-Polish family in Vienna, and was a part of the city's highly assimilated, sophisticated and cultured Jewish community. Her mother had been a student of Adler, my mother knew the Freuds.' But, after the Anschluss in 1938, when it 'became evident that it was very dangerous to be a Jew under the German occupation', Gertrude – a mere 18-year-old at the time – fled Austria for the UK with the help of some Quakers. 'She was transferred to Sheffield to work at the hospitals as a junior nurse.' Brody's grandmother eventually managed to join her daughter and her daughter's new husband (a Jewish doctor) in Sheffield. 'But by the end of the war, she discovered that almost everybody else in her family was dead.' All of this contributes towards the couple's commitment to the Palestinian cause. 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She is unbelievably glad that she didn't give in to her impulse to cancel that night, she says. 'By that point I'd had to play a lot of characters in Shakespeare who fell in love at first sight, and I always thought it was ridiculous. But when I walked into the room and met Hugh, something really weird happened to me. Something shifted in my gut. All evening I sat and listened to his stories and thought: 'You are the most interesting and gorgeous man I've ever met.'' The actor's screen credits include a Bafta-nominated turn as a grieving wife in Anthony Minghella's 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply (opposite Alan Rickman), a hapless mother in Bend it Like Beckham, and a nurse in Mona Lisa Smile. On stage, she has been in productions including Measure for Measure, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Death and the Maiden – for which she received the Olivier award for best actress. 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Actors such as Melissa Barrera and Susan Sarandon were dropped by Hollywood companies for their comments on Israel and Palestine. 'I do, as do my kids. But I just don't feel like I've got a choice. Does my career really matter, alongside what's going on in Gaza? 'I look at younger actors, and I completely understand why they feel too frightened to speak. They have everything to lose. But I enjoy a lot of status in the industry. I've done a huge amount of work and I continue to work. What really matters to me is that when I get to the end, I can look back and know that I did what I thought was right at the time.' This article was amended on 13 July 2025. An earlier version said that the character Nina in Truly, Madly, Deeply was a cellist. In fact, her husband Jamie was the cellist.
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Felicity Cloake's How to make the perfect …
When I visited Hanoi a decade ago, I was living in Hackney, east London, an area with a large Vietnamese community, so I felt, if not quite an expert, at least a little familiar with the cuisine. But it turned out no number of nights out on Kingsland Road could prepare me for the assault on the senses that was my first meal in the city, crouched on a plastic stool by the roadside and enjoying what Uyen Luu describes as 'the irresistible sweet, treacly smell of barbecued patties and caramelised pork', all mingled with traffic fumes. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. The stall in question served one thing only: bún chả, a northern speciality of juicy chargrilled pork, cold, slippery rice noodles, sweet yet deeply savoury nước chấm dipping sauce and fistfuls of aromatic herbs. 'About as typical and unique a Hanoi dish as there is,' as Anthony Bourdain explained to Barack Obama over bowls of the stuff in 2016, there's something about the way you can pick and mix the different elements to make every bite unique that makes this pure joy to eat. Chef and restaurateur Bobby Chinn describes bún chả as 'a great example of the art of Vietnamese grilling', and says it's made with either 'thin strips of pork belly grilled until the meat is slightly crisp and smoky, or as little burgers. I generally prefer the latter, because these burgers are quite unique.' Very often the two options are served together, as in Uyen Luu and Vy Tran's recipes, in which pork belly slices are marinated in a mixture of fish sauce, sugar, garlic, shallots and black pepper for several hours before grilling (Tran freezes the meat for 45 minutes or so to facilitate cutting, though a butcher should be able to save you the trouble). Delicious as they are, I'm inclined to agree with Chinn that the pork patties are the real crowdpleasers, so they will be the stars of my recipe, too (if you'd like the whole shooting match, by all means replace half the pork mince with thin strips of skinless pork belly, and divide the marinade between the two). As almost everyone notes, this dish needs to be made with fairly fatty meat, 'which helps it', Chinn says, 'retain incredible moisture, simultaneously allowing the fat to melt, sweating the meat with drips of fat into the fire allows for a more smoky flavour'. A minimum of 20% fat is ideal; my butcher makes it with shoulder, which seems to work as well as the belly specified by some writers. Given the full-flavoured dipping sauce with which the patties are served, my testers prefer those that aren't loaded with sugar or salty soy or oyster sauce. Luu's book Vietnam, and Chinn's Vietnamese Food both start with a caramel sauce, the latter using palm sugar heated until it begins to smoke for a dark, complex sweetness. Though I'm sure he's right that this is 'the one additive that should never be omitted', in practice, my testers prefer the more savoury, porky patties, which I'm relieved about, because mixing hot sugar syrup and cold pork is more difficult than it sounds. As a nod to those caramel sauces, however (an ingredient I do love in recipes such as red boat pork belly), I've gone for food writer Vicky Pham's brown variety, which, she says 'helps to caramelise and char the pork patties and provide a sweet sticky glaze when grilled'. It's all balanced with a dash of fish sauce; for extra savouriness, you could also pop in a pinch of MSG or powdered stock, as Luu suggests. I also really like Pham's chopped lemongrass, but as hers is the only recipe I find that features it (lemongrass is, I'm reliably informed, more common in the cooking of the south), I've left it out. Chopped shallots are fairly standard, however (if you go to a specialist supermarket for the herbs and noodles, see if they have small red Asian shallots, which are both more fiddly and more pungent than their larger European counterparts), while Luke Nguyen also adds garlic, chives and spring onion, though finely chopped garlic is more common. The only spice in any of the recipes I try is freshly ground black pepper, but two recipes, from Pham's website and Nguyen's book The Songs of Sapa (another extraordinarily beautiful place) use roasted rice powder and beaten egg to bind the patties. I don't have a problem with them falling apart once the meat has been chilled to firm up, though, so I wouldn't bother. (Non pork-eating readers could substitute minced turkey or chicken, though their lower fat content means you will probably need to add beaten egg; or try a plant-based version and report back.) Although the larger patties preferred by Luu and Tran remain juicier during cooking, my testers prefer the convenience and smokier flavour of the bite-sized ones in other recipes, especially when they've been cooked on a barbecue. Not that this is the only option: following alternative suggestions from the recipes, I try them, in order of preference: baked (which works, as would an air fryer, though I'd flash them under a hot grill at the end to try to achieve a bit of charring), a frying pan, an overhead grill and, the second best option to getting out the charcoal, a hot griddle pan. As if reading my mind, Tran writes on Serious Eats that, 'while it might be convenient to cook the pork in a stovetop grill pan, the result will lack the smoky flavour and char essential to bún chả.' While undeniably true, I promise that either way the results will be so delicious that you're unlikely to be wracked with regret. (Note, if you do go down the barbecue route, a fish cage will make turning the meatballs easier.) According to Pham, 'while the pork is integral to bún chả, it's the dipping sauce (nước chấm) that makes or breaks the meal', because it helps bring together the disparate parts into one unified whole. Tran offers a useful guide for novices: 'To eat bún chả, taste the dipping sauce first before adding other condiments or accompaniments such as raw garlic or sliced bird's eye chilli … Add fresh herbs to the bowl and throw a small heap of vermicelli noodles in the dipping sauce. Take your chopsticks and pick up the noodles along with meat, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs.' Nước chấm is based on fish sauce, preferably a traditionally fermented Vietnamese version that tends to be less harshly salty than cheaper cooking varieties, and sugar. Pham, who is based in California, also uses a Puerto Rican brand of coconut soda in hers, which is tough to track down in the UK, so I substitute coconut water – but, in the end, most of my testers prefer the punchier, zestier notes of sauces that feature more lime juice and rice vinegar than coconut sweetness. (Vinegar is often provided on the table along with sliced garlic and bird's eye chilli, so you can adjust to taste.) Interestingly, opinions vary as to the desirable temperature of said sauce; Luu, Chinn and Pham serve it at room temperature, and Nguyen and Tran steaming hot, with the latter writing approvingly that at Bún Chả Đắc Kim in Hanoi, 'the dipping sauce was boiling when the cook ladled it into the bowl containing the meat. Given how fatty the patties and pork slices are, the high temperature prevents fat droplets from coagulating at the top'. According to Mervin Lee of the Michelin Guide Vietnam, it's a weather thing: 'The broth is served cool in summer for a refreshing contrast to the smoky pork and gently warmed in winter, infusing each bite with comforting heat'. In other words, it's up to you. Not all the recipes I try include pickled vegetables, but I'm a fan: the vinegar cuts through the fattiness of the pork, while the vegetables themselves add yet another texture and flavour to the party. Green papaya (which you'll probably need to go to an south-east Asian grocers for) is, I think, the ideal, but as crunch is the point here, thinly sliced carrot, kohlrabi and radish also work well. (If you don't have time for pickling, Pham's slices of cucumber or Nguyen's beansprouts make fine substitutes.) Lettuce leaves are also a nice touch, but the essential thing to finish this dish are herbs – and in quantity. Though fish mint and Vietnamese coriander prove elusive even in central London, Thai basil is becoming much easier to find, and perilla (shiso) is increasingly available, too. If you don't have the luxury of specialists nearby, however, rest assured that the important thing is the punch of aromatics that fresh herbs deliver, so a fistful of fresh coriander and mint will do much the same job. Very little dissent here: rice vermicelli is the move on the bún chả front, though Pham specifies medium-sized round rice noodles (which I misread and end up with medium-size flat rice ones, instead. Worse things happen at sea, as my grandma would say, had she ever had a rice noodle). The noodles are served cold, so you can prepare them, like almost all the elements of this dish, in advance, making it an excellent choice for a relaxed barbecue party. Prep 30 min Chill 15 min+Pickle 2 hrCook 8 min Serves 4 For the patties400g pork mince – not too lean, ideally2 tbsp fish sauce 2 tbsp finely chopped shallots 4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed1 tsp soft brown sugar 1½ tsp coarsely ground black pepper Salt Oil, for greasing the griddle or grill bars, and your hands For the pickles200g carrot, radish (eg, daikon), kohlrabi and/or green papaya 2 tbsp rice vinegar 20g sugar ¼ tsp fine salt For the dipping sauce150ml fish sauce 150ml rice vinegar 100g sugar Juice of 5 limes To serve 300g rice vermicelli 1 small head of lettuce 1 generous handful mixed fresh herbs – perilla, Thai basil, mint, coriander 4 bird's eye chilli, thinly sliced4 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced Put all the ingredients for the patties bar the oil in a large bowl, mix well, then use greased hands to tear off small pieces and roll into bite-sized meatballs. Slightly flatten each ball, then put in the fridge to chill and firm up for at least 15 minutes. Meanwhile, peel and finely slice the pickling vegetables into rounds or strands, then put in a bowl or jar. Heat the vinegar, sugar and salt in a small pan, stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt, then tip over the vegetables, mix well and leave to sit, tossing occasionally, ideally for at least a couple of hours. Put the fish sauce, rice vinegar and sugar for the dipping sauce in a saucepan with 600ml water, and heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Cook the noodles according to packet instructions, then drain, refresh and set aside. Prepare a barbecue, or lightly grease a griddle pan and set it on a medium-high heat (if using a fish cage for the barbecue, lightly grease that, or the grill bars themselves). Grill the patties for 10-12 minutes, turning once, until cooked through and well charred all over. While they're cooking, separate, wash and dry the lettuce, then arrange the leaves on a large plate. Put the picked, washed herb leaves and the sliced chilli and garlic alongside. Put the drained noodles in a separate dish and bring out the pickles and some extra vinegar. Reheat the dipping sauce, if you want to serve it warm, then stir in the lime juice. Divide the sauce between four bowls. Add a couple of the pork patties to each bowl and serve the rest alongside the pickles, noodles and salad plate. Fellow bún chả fans, where makes your favourite version (has anyone been to Bún Chả Hương Liên for the Combo Obama?), and what are your top tips for making it at home?
Daily Mail
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Ski in the Alps in the morning and swim in the Med in the afternoon! Our travel expert's ultimate guide to Slovenia, one of Europe's best-kept secrets
My passion for Slovenia was forged in the context of war, when I wrote about its brief battle in 1991 to break free from Yugoslavia. It amazes me that more than three decades on this fabulous country is still on so few people's tourist radar. Slovenia, the size of Wales, used to market itself as the 'sunny side of the Alps', a microcosm that offers a taste of Alpine grandeur along with the swagger of the Mediterranean.
