The Hwacheon Ice Fishing Festival Organizing Committee has just announced an extremely impressive piece of information: Within just 15 days since its opening, the festival has attracted more than 1 million visitors, including nearly 40,000 international visitors. This number once again affirms the festival's strong appeal to domestic and foreign tourists. This impressive number shows the festival's ever-increasing appeal and affirms Hwacheon's position as a leading winter tourist destination.
Since its inception in 2003, the Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Fishing Festival has quickly established itself as one of the largest and most anticipated winter events in Korea. With its ever-growing popularity, the festival has attracted an average of over one million visitors each year and is becoming increasingly well-known globally. It is noteworthy that this year’s festival season reached the one million visitor milestone a day earlier than last year, demonstrating the event’s ever-growing popularity.
More than 1 million visitors came to the annual Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival in Hwacheon, Gangwon Province.
According to the organizers, this year's festival is expected to last 23 days until January 28. The mountain town of Hwacheon is located 25km south of the inter-Korean border and about 90km northeast of the capital Seoul.
In 2020, the festival was interrupted by unseasonably high temperatures and heavy rain. The next two events were also canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but Hwacheon, a town of just 24,000 people, attracted 1.31 million visitors in 2023 when the festival returned.
Visitors to the Ice Fishing Festival not only get to take part in the bustling winter atmosphere but also enjoy discount coupons to buy local products.
The Hwacheon Ice Festival is world-famous for its thousands of eager visitors who participate in the activity of catching “sancheoneo” (a type of mountain trout that lives only in very clean freshwater), by dropping fishing lines through holes in the ice or catching fish with their bare hands.
The festival has transformed Hwacheon, a county of just 23,000 people, into a popular winter destination in South Korea. Despite challenges such as an unusually warm winter, heavy rains in 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic that forced the cancellation of many events in 2021 and 2022, the festival has maintained its reputation as the "million-person festival" for 16 years.
The key to event success is a creative approach and the ability to adapt quickly to change.
In addition, visitors can also participate in other recreational activities on the glacier such as skiing and ice skating.
For example, in 2016, the Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Fishing Festival became the first winter festival in Korea to introduce night fishing, a unique idea that attracted widespread attention.
In addition to the main event – ice fishing for sancheoneo, a type of mountain trout – the event also attracts visitors with a variety of activities. Every Saturday, the festival features a lantern parade through the streets, reminiscent of the lively street performances at Canada's Quebec Winter Carnival.
