Three days in Daegu: where Koreans climb a mountain to ask for one wish
Two nights in Korea's fourth city: the herb market and the missionary quarter downtown, a full day on Palgongsan, and fried chicken in between.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Daegu
- Places
- 8 across 3 days
Daegu sits in a flat basin ringed by mountains, which is why it is reliably the hottest city in South Korea and why residents talk about the summer the way other people talk about an illness. It is the fourth largest city in the country and it gets a fraction of the visitors that Seoul or Busan do.
What it has is a long memory. This was the herb and medicine market for the whole southeast for centuries, the place the National Debt Redemption Movement started, and where eight hundred schoolchildren went on strike in 1960 in a protest that helped bring down a president within two months. Almost none of that is on the usual Korea route.
The other reason to come is the mountain. Palgongsan rises straight off the north eastern edge of the city, covered in Buddhist carvings, with a stone Buddha in a stone hat at the top of it that Koreans climb an hour of steps to petition. Two nights is right: one day for the city, one for the mountain.
Highlights
- A medicine market that has been trading roots and bark for over three centuries
- The missionary quarter, with two of the first Christian churches in the region
- A mural street for the songwriter this city has never got over
- Donghwasa and its colossal stone Buddha, on the south side of Palgongsan
- Gatbawi, the wish-granting Buddha, at the top of a very long staircase
Where to stay
Daegu, two nights
Stay downtown around Banwoldang or Dongseongno. That puts the medicine market, the old churches and the mural street within a fifteen-minute walk, two subway lines under your feet and the eating streets outside the door.
The area around Dongdaegu station is convenient for the train and dull for everything else. It is a fifteen-minute subway ride from the centre, which is not worth the saving.
Day by day
Day 1 in Daegu
The medicine market, the modern alley and Kim Gwangseok's wall
Everything today is inside a square kilometre of downtown. Start at Yangnyeongsi, the herb market, which has been dealing in medicinal roots, bark and dried animals since the seventeenth century and still smells like it from the end of the street. The museum in the middle of it explains what is in the sacks.
Walk from there into the modern alley, the strip of missionary-era buildings on the low hill above the market. The Catholic church with the neo-Gothic spires was the first in the region, the Presbyterian church beside it was the first Protestant one, and the brick houses on the slope were built by American missionaries who arrived in the 1890s.
Finish at the mural wall. Kim Gwangseok was a folk singer from this neighbourhood who died in 1996 at thirty-one, and the alley where he grew up is now three hundred and fifty metres of painted portraits, lyrics and benches with his songs playing. It is unashamedly sentimental and Koreans come here specifically to feel it.
- 10:30
Daegu Yangnyeongsi Oriental Medicine Museum
CultureThe museum at the heart of the herb market, free, with a room where you can try the medicinal teas. Walk the market streets around it afterwards, which is the real exhibit.
- 12:30
Gyesan Catholic Shurch
VisitTwin spires above the old quarter, and the starting point of the signposted walking route through the missionary houses and the alley stairs behind them.
- 15:00
Kim Gwangseok-gil Street
VisitPainted portraits and lyrics the length of the stream wall, best in the late afternoon. The market at the end of it does street food from about five.
- 19:00
Chicken and beer on Dongseongno
EatThe pedestrian streets north of the crossroads are wall to wall with fried chicken. Order a half-and-half if you cannot choose between plain and sweet chilli.
With more time: The old walled park a few minutes west has a pavilion, a small history hall and a lot of retired men playing board games, and it is the best place downtown to see how the city spends an ordinary afternoon.
Day 2 in Daegu
Palgongsan: the temple, the ridge and the wish-granting Buddha
A full day on the mountain, and a long one. Palgongsan fills the skyline on that side of the city, with its main peak at 1,192 metres, and the whole range is scattered with pagodas, rock carvings and cliff Buddhas.
Start at Donghwasa on the southern side, a temple founded in the fifth century and rebuilt many times, where a colossal modern stone Buddha stands in the open with a plaza in front of it. The cable car from beside the temple lifts you onto the ridge in a few minutes and gives you the whole basin of the city on one side and the mountains on the other.
Then, if the legs are willing, cross to the eastern side for Gatbawi. The stone Buddha on Gwanbong wears a flat stone slab like the wide-brimmed hat of a Joseon scholar, was carved in the unified Silla period, and is believed to grant every visitor a single wish in their lifetime. The staircase up to it takes about an hour, and on any weekend it is full of people climbing it with something specific to ask.
- 09:00
Dongwha_Sa
ReligiousBus from downtown, about an hour. The great standing Buddha is behind the main compound; the temple halls and the woods around them are quieter and older.
- 11:30
Mt. Palgong
NatureThe cable car goes up from beside the temple to a viewing ridge with paths along it. Half an hour up and down, more if you walk the ridge, and pointless in low cloud.
- 13:30
Lunch at the temple gate
EatThe restaurants along the approach road do mountain vegetable bibimbap, acorn jelly and pajeon. Cheap, and the last proper food before the climb.
- 14:30
Gatbawi
OtherBus 401 to the eastern trailhead, then an hour of steps. Take water. Come down before dark, and check the time of the last bus before you start up.
With more time: This is a lot for one day. If the climb does not appeal, stop after the cable car and spend the afternoon on Apsan instead, which is on the southern edge of the city, has its own cable car and gets you back for dinner.
Day 3 in Daegu
Two memorial parks, and the train
A short political morning before you leave, in two parks ten minutes apart in the centre of town.
In 1907 a campaign started here to pay off the national debt to Japan by public subscription: people gave up tobacco and alcohol and sold jewellery, and though it failed to prevent annexation it is remembered as the first mass civic movement in the country. The park named after it has a bell pavilion, plenty of shade and people eating lunch on the grass.
Ten minutes away is the memorial to what happened on 28 February 1960, when around eight hundred Daegu high school students walked out in protest at being ordered to attend school on a Sunday to stop them hearing an opposition candidate speak. It was the first street protest against the Rhee government, and the revolution that removed him followed within two months.
- 09:30
Gukchae Bosang Memorial Park
LeisureA proper city park with a fountain and the debt campaign memorial at its centre. Fifteen minutes of reading and as long as you like on a bench.
- 11:00
2.28 Democratic Movement Memorial Park
VisitSmall, central and easy to walk past. The plaques set out what the students did and what happened to them, and it takes about twenty minutes.
- 12:30
Subway to Dongdaegu Station
TravelFifteen minutes on line 1 from the centre. KTX trains north and south run at least twice an hour through the middle of the day.
With more time: With a later train, the national museum on the southern side of the city covers the archaeology of the whole province, including the Silla and Gaya tombs that are dug up around here regularly.
Before you go
Getting in
Daegu is on the main line, so the KTX gets you here in under two hours from Seoul and about forty minutes from Busan. Trains use Dongdaegu, east of the centre, which is on the subway and connected to the intercity bus terminals.
Daegu also has a small international airport east of the centre with flights to Jeju, Japan and China. Bus 401 or a short taxi puts you downtown.
Getting around
Three subway lines cross the centre, including a driverless elevated line with good views, and a T-money or Cashbee card works on all of them and on the buses. Downtown is compact enough to walk.
The mountain is the exception. City buses run from the centre out to the temple and, on a different route, to the foot of the steps up to the stone Buddha. They are not fast: allow forty minutes to an hour each way, and check the last bus back.
When to go
Spring and autumn, and this is one Korean city where that advice is not optional: July and August here are brutal, humid and often several degrees hotter than anywhere else in the country.
April brings cherry blossom on the mountain roads, and late October and early November bring the maples, which is when the temple approach is at its best and busiest.
What to eat
Fried chicken with beer, which locals will tell you was perfected here, and several of the national chains did start in this city. The other local dishes are makchang, grilled pork intestine, and jjimgalbi, ribs braised in garlic and chilli until they fall apart.
The downtown alleys are organised by dish, which makes ordering easy: find the street that sells what you want and pick the shop with the most people in it.
Daegu does not perform for visitors, which is the argument for coming. The medicine market is a working market, the mural street is for Koreans rather than tourists, and nobody on the mountain is there for the view.
Give the mountain the whole day and the city the ends of two others, and keep out of the middle of August.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Daegu worth a stop?
- Not on a first trip to Korea, honestly. Seoul, Gyeongju and Busan come first. On a second trip, or if you are travelling the main line slowly, two nights here buys you a mountain full of Buddhas, a market unlike anything else in the country and a city with almost no other foreign visitors in it.
- Can I do Palgongsan on public transport?
- Yes, and most people do. City buses run to the temple on one route and to the foot of the Gatbawi steps on another, taking forty minutes to an hour each way. What they do not do is connect the two quickly, so doing both in a day means going back towards the city in between.
- How hard is the climb to Gatbawi?
- It is stone steps most of the way and takes about an hour up at a steady pace, with handrails and rest points. Plenty of people in their seventies do it. In midsummer heat it is genuinely unpleasant, so go early or go in another season.
- Is Haeinsa near here?
- Reasonably: the temple holding the Tripitaka Koreana woodblocks is about an hour and a half west by bus, and it is a long day trip rather than an afternoon. If it is the main thing you want, base yourself here and give it a whole day.
- How does Daegu fit a longer trip?
- It sits between Seoul and Busan on the fast line, and Gyeongju is an hour east. Copy these three days into JourneyComposer and drop them into a Seoul to Busan route; the trains are frequent enough that it costs you nothing but the nights.