Ever Heard of “Korea’s Santorini”?

One of Greece’s most popular destinations, Santorini is well-known for the stunning whitewashed buildings along the mountain slopes overlooking the sea and the bright blue roofs so closely crowded. There is one such place in Busan: Gamcheon Culture Village, a hillside village on the foothills of Cheonmasan overlooking the sea.

In order to understand the historical background of how this village came to be reborn as one of Busan’s most famous destinations, we have to travel back in time to 1975. Let us take a closer look into how a poverty-stricken village deprived of development transformed itself into an iconic place with cascading tiers of houses and stunning art works.

A Shanty Town without Shanties?

The birth of Gamcheon Culture Village goes back in time to the colonial period in the 1920s. As the modernization of Busan began to take place centering on its harbors, farmers from other regions flooded into the city in search of jobs. Those who were unable to find a place to live due to the lack of housing capacity began to build straw huts along the mountain slopes. War refugees swarmed around and immigrants forcibly displaced by the forced migration policy settled down nearby, forming a shanty town packed with tiers and tiers of huts.

Shanty, a crudely-built shack using boards and mud to build walls and tent as roof, was a symbol of poverty. A close look at the houses in today’s Gamcheon Culture Village, however, reveal that they are not shanties but modern two-story cement houses with slate roofs. The shanties that filled the village in the 1950s no longer remain.

“Don’t Look at Trees You Can’t Climb”

As late as the early 1970s, the slopes of Gamcheon-dong were jam-packed with some 2,000 shanties. Roughly 20,000 residents in this shanty town mostly made a living as cobblers, yeot (Korean taffy) sellers, junk dealers or street vendors. Shanties over 20 years old were decrepit and unhygienic but their occupants couldn’t even dream of repairing their houses, either because they were too poor or considered leaving the town if they had enough money.

In 1975, Saemaul leader Lee Won-Sun wanted to improve the poor village environment. The most urgent task was housing improvement. He knocked on every door in an effort to persuade the villagers but not many people were willing to come onboard. Accepting poverty as fate, some even told him to “not even look at a tree you can’t climb”. It wasn’t until rain began to leak through the roof and cold winds blew in through the cracks on the walls that people found it hard to withstand their living environment and started to open their ears to Lee’s words.

Improving 2,000 Shanties through Cooperation

Technical examination by experts revealed that shacks in Gamcheon-dong situated on slopes over 60 degrees could not be subject to housing improvement, as houses on any slope over 45 degrees were too risky to undergo housing improvement and repair. Moreover, these shacks were unlicensed, small-scale structures that did not meet the criteria for housing improvement support by Busan Metropolitan City. Lee demanded that the City approve the housing improvement as a Saemaul project, promising that he and his villagers would take the matter into their own hands. The authorities doubted that his application would result in an approval given the sheer size of the project, but Lee succeeded in gaining the City’s approval.

First of all, the villagers decided to use the joint fund they had collected to improve 34 houses as a pilot initiative. Each person worked in their own occupation during the day and got together at night to work on the houses. Completing the pilor housing improvement in roughly 20 days, the villagers were filled with hope and collected more funds by cutting back on their spending to continue improving more houses.

Once it became physically too hard to continue this way, Lee and the villagers came up with a new plan: they decided to rent out 350 houses that had been improved and repaired, and use the rent collected from these houses as funds for the next set of houses to be improved. The villagers saved time by developing a community kitchen and completed woodworking, plastering and even tile-setting all on their own. On June 30, 1978, only three and a half years after the launch of the housing improvement project, Lee and the villagers had finished improving over 2,000 shacks in Gamcheon-dong without any outside help.