I’ve just discovered a great way to help plan a trip to a particular part of Korea to make sure you get maximum value from your time in the area.
Go to the Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA) website, go to Explore Heritage and then Heritage Search. In the search form, select the Location (province or city) you’re going to, leaving everything else blank, and hit SEARCH.
Depending on the cultural richness of the area you’re going to, you’ll have maybe 10 pages of heritage items. You then have the option to export the data into Excel. Once in a nice spreadsheet you can then filter the items by location (eg, county), or whether it’s a historic site, national treasure, or whatever.
If an item appears of interest, search the CHA database for the designated number you want more info on, and you’ll find a description and hopefully some images too.
For my upcoming trip to Haenam and Land’s End it’s invaluable, highlighting items of interest that you can’t find on the county’s website. But having originally planned a couple of days there, now that I’ve properly mined the heritage database I need to spend a week in the area. And then a week in Gangjin, and then a day or two on Wando… and so it goes on…
I’ve now downloaded the whole Cultural Heritage Administration database into an excel spreadsheet. Hours of fun to be had, and a road trip of several years.
This search works for all provinces apart from Jejudo, which is weird. Is there no heritage on the island?
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