Jumunjin

Where it sits. Jumunjin is a fishing town in the northeastern corner of Gangneung, on the East Sea coast of Gangwon Province, about twenty kilometres up the shore from the city centre. Roughly twenty thousand people live here across some seven thousand households, and the town's identity is entirely maritime: Jumunjin Harbour shelters several hundred registered fishing vessels and is the most important landing port on the Gangwon coast. The shoreline alternates between working quay, concrete breakwater and long stretches of coarse pale sand backed by pines. The water is cold, clear and comes in dark blue rather than turquoise, and because the coast faces almost due east, the sun rises straight out of the sea.

A working port, not a resort. The rhythm of the town is set by the auction hall rather than by the beach. Boats come in through the night and the morning trade at the Suhyup fisheries market moves squid, mackerel, flatfish, crab and, in season, the sandfish that Gangwon cooks stew with radish. Rows of squid hang splayed on drying racks along the quays, stiff as paper by the second day. The lanes behind the harbour are full of small raw-fish restaurants where the tank on the pavement is the menu, and a strip of stalls sells grilled fishcake and steamed crab to visitors who came for the scenery and stayed for lunch. Nothing about the port has been prettified, which is precisely why film crews keep coming.

On screen. The breakwater at Jumunjin carries one of the most recognisable images in modern Korean television. In the opening episode of Guardian: The Lonely and Great God, the tvN drama broadcast from December 2016 to January 2017 and known everywhere as Goblin, the schoolgirl Ji Eun-tak, played by Kim Go-eun, blows out a candle on the sea wall and the immortal Kim Shin, played by Gong Yoo, materialises behind her holding a bouquet of buckwheat flowers. The shot lasts seconds. It has generated a permanent queue ever since: a small stand near the breakwater rents red scarves and paper bouquets so visitors can restage it, and on summer weekends the line runs back along the quay. The town has other credits — the landscape here was used as a backdrop for the 2000 feature Kilimanjaro — but the goblin's breakwater is the reason coaches now stop.

A white lighthouse has stood above the port since the early twentieth century, and the racks below it are usually hung with squid split and pegged out to dry in the salt wind.

The wider drama coast. Gangneung's shoreline has become a corridor of screen locations, and Jumunjin sits at the top of it. About ten kilometres south, the bus stop at Yeongjin Beach was used for the 2017 photographs and video that accompanied BTS's You Never Walk Alone release, and it now has its own queue and its own replica shelter. Gyeongpo Beach and its lagoon, Anmok's coffee street with its wall of cafés, and the sunrise village of Jeongdongjin further south all pull the same visitors. The practical effect is that a coastal day here is usually assembled from three or four locations rather than spent in one, and the local buses are used to carrying people who want the sea wall, the bus stop and the beach in the same afternoon.

What is actually there. Jumunjin Beach itself is a broad, gently shelving arc of sand with a pine belt behind it and low dunes, quiet for ten months of the year and packed for two. The breakwater is a working structure of concrete tetrapods and a red-and-white beacon, not a promenade, and the sea throws spray over it in any wind. North of the harbour, Sotdae Beach and the rocky shore toward Yeongok give better tide pools. The town has cheap guesthouses and motels rather than resorts, and prices reflect that. Sunrise is the local ritual: the horizon reddens well before the sun clears it, and the fishing fleet returning at that hour is the reason photographers set alarms.

Getting there and timing. The KTX line opened for the 2018 PyeongChang Games put Gangneung within about two hours of Seoul's Cheongnyangni Station, and city buses run up the coast from Gangneung terminal to Jumunjin in roughly forty minutes. Late spring and early autumn give the cleanest air and the emptiest sand; the East Sea only really warms enough for comfortable swimming from mid-July, which is also when half the country arrives. Winter brings hard wind and sometimes snow to the water's edge, and the seafood is at its best then. The harbour front is flat and easy to walk, but the breakwater itself is uneven and exposed, and it is not a safe place to stand in heavy swell.