Day 08 @ Suncheon – Suncheon Drama Film Set

Apart from the Suncheon Bay National Garden and the Wetland Reserve, there’s actually a number of other attractions in the city of Suncheon: just that they didn’t look especially enticing for tourists like us. The Suncheon Drama Film Set though looked interesting though: this set has been used by a large number of Korean TV shows and films that depict the 1960s to 1980s Korea, and is today noted as a popular place for locals to check-out. Thing is: we’re not actually followers of K-drama and films, and the closest is the wife who binge watches the occasional K-drama series on Netflix now and then.

Still, we had a full free day in this city, and admission into this place was included in the Integrated Pass we’d already bought. So, we worked out a plan to visit this set in the morning, and head to the Nagan Eupseong Folk Village in the afternoon. The set was about 8 minutes cab ride from Baguni Hostel, and like the previous day when we visited the National Garden, there were few other visitors when we arrived about 25 minutes after the 9AM opening hour on this Saturday morning.

There seems to be at least two distinct areas of the area: the one that’s immediately accessed from the entrance and depicting the retail, business and entertainment district – and includes sets for a small movie theater, shops offering different types of wares, and a police station with a holding cell. The second area is a little further in and sits on a gentle hill, and is residential with dozens of small houses built around a network of narrow alleys and pathways.

Pictures from our visit!

The set opens at 9AM. We arrived at 9:25AM and were among the first visitors on this Saturday morning.

The very 1960s looking movie theater. We thought it was just a facade, but was pleasantly surprised to see that we could visit and see the insides of the theater.
The theater was screening a demo show-reel of the productions filmed on location.

The inner area of the set that has rows of 1960s houses on a steep incline.

A small church at the top of the small hill. Like the movie theater, this isn’t just the shell of a church, but completely built inside, alongside pews and a working piano even.

The piano was in pretty good shape and still reasonably in tune for public pianos, though the sustain pedal was not working.
Still relatively free of crowds at 10:45AM, but we started seeing more groups of visitors arriving close to noon when we were leaving.
Map of the area.
Hmm: that girl character looks familiar!

We spent more than 2 hours in the park and found it interesting, even if we didn’t quite have the visual reference of how these sets were used in the Korean productions. Continued in the post!

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