Busan Old Town: War Capital, Markets and the Bridge

Walk the wartime capital of Korea — Yongdusan Park, the alleys of Gukje Market, BIFF Square, Jagalchi fish market and the lifting bridge of separated families.

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All Korea walking tours · All 147 routes

Busan, Korea · ~120 min · 3.0 km · 5 stops

Stops on this walk

1. Yongdusan Park & Busan Tower 용두산공원과 부산타워

The dragon-head hill above the old port — the best first look at the city that saved a country.

Yongdusan — 'Dragon Head Mountain' — is the hill where Busan began. During the Korean War (1950–53), when Seoul fell within days, this city became the provisional capital of the Republic of Korea. The country as it exists today survived because the perimeter around Busan held. The park above you filled with refugees' shacks during the war; two great fires later cleared them, and the hill was replanted as the city's memorial garden. Busan Tower (1973) rises 120 meters from the summit, its silhouette modeled on the baldachin of Dabotap pagoda in Gyeongju. Below the hill on the harbor side ran 'Texas Street,' the postwar port district of sailors and smuggled goods — the raw commerce that rebuilt the city.

From the observation deck, read the city's geography: mountains pressing against the sea, buildings climbing every slope. Busan's character — improvised, vertical, unpretentious — was set by war refugees who had nowhere to build but up the hillsides.

2. Gukje Market 국제시장

The 'International Market' born from war relief goods — Korea's most storied marketplace.

When 400,000 refugees poured into Busan in 1950, they traded whatever they carried — then whatever fell off American supply ships. That improvised economy became Gukje ('International') Market, named for the foreign goods that flowed through it. The 2014 film 'Ode to My Father' (14 million tickets — a quarter of the country) is set in one of these shops, and the real store from the film, 'Kkotbunine,' still operates. For older Koreans this market is not nostalgia; it is the family origin story. Today its 1,500 stalls sell everything from tailored suits to army-surplus flashlights, in alleys still organized by the wartime logic of one-trade-per-lane.

Markets like this are disappearing across Asia, replaced by malls. Gukje survives because Busan treats it as identity, not real estate. Buy something small — the transaction, with its rounding-down and thrown-in extras, is the heritage.

3. BIFF Square & Bosu-dong Direction BIFF광장

Where Asia's biggest film festival was born — and where hotteok pancakes cause the longest queues.

In 1996, a port city with no film industry launched the Busan International Film Festival in these streets of old single-screen cinemas. It became Asia's most important film festival and lifted Korean cinema onto the world stage years before 'Parasite.' The hand-prints of directors — Im Kwon-taek, Wim Wenders, Zhang Yimou — are set into the pavement under your feet. The festival has since moved to shiny Centum City, but it kept the name BIFF Square for its birthplace — a film industry acknowledging its port-town parentage.

Join the longest queue — it ends at ssiat-hotteok, a fried pancake stuffed with brown sugar and seeds, invented here. Festival stars eat it on camera every October. One pancake, one shared civic ritual.

4. Jagalchi Fish Market 자갈치시장

Korea's largest seafood market, run for seventy years by the 'Jagalchi ajimae' — the market women of Busan.

Jagalchi is Korea's largest seafood market, named after the pebbles (jagal) of the original beach. Its identity belongs to the 'Jagalchi ajimae' — the market women who took over the stalls when the war left them widowed or their husbands at sea, and whose daughters and granddaughters run them now. The main building (2006) is shaped like a seagull's wings, but the real market spills along the wharf outside: tanks of octopus and sea squirts, hagfish grilling on braziers, auction shouts at dawn. Upstairs, you pick your fish downstairs and eat it minutes later — the shortest supply chain in Korean cuisine.

'Oiso, boiso, saiso' — come, look, buy — is the market's dialect greeting, now its official slogan. Busan's saturi dialect is at full volume here. You don't need to understand it; the rhythm is the message.

5. Yeongdo Bridge 영도대교

The lifting bridge where war-separated families searched for each other — it still rises every afternoon.

Built in 1934, Yeongdo Bridge was Korea's first bascule bridge — its road deck lifting to let ships pass. During the war it became something else: the meeting point. Families scattered by the fighting would tell each other, 'If we are separated, meet at Yeongdo Bridge.' Thousands waited here daily, reading the notes pinned to its railings. Fortune-tellers' tents lined the approach — refugees asking whether missing sons were alive. The bridge appears in the era's most famous song, 'Be Strong, Geum-sun' — a brother singing to the sister he lost in the crowds of this city. The lifting mechanism, retired in 1966, was restored in 2013. At 2 pm daily, sirens sound and the 590-ton deck rises to 75 degrees.

Bridges usually symbolize connection between places. This one symbolizes connection between people — a fixed point in a nation's memory of losing and finding each other. If you can time your walk for 2 pm, do. A crowd still gathers.