Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival
Winter Festival — Ice Fishing · Hwacheoncheon Creek, Hwacheon-eup, Hwacheon-gun County, Gangwon-do, South Korea
Mainstream
The festival
23,000 inhabitants, more than a million visitors: on frozen Hwacheoncheon Creek, sancheoneo — the mountain trout known as "Queen of the Valley" — is fished through a hole in the ice, or with bare hands, before tasting it immediately, sliced or grilled on site. Born in 2003, the festival was counted by CNN among its "seven wonders of winter" since 2011, and became in 2024 the only winter festival in Korea designated as a world festival, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily.
The welcome is to the whole world: a fishing area is reserved for foreign visitors, with rest space and Muslim prayer room (documented details on edition 2026).
Good to know
Organizers: Hwacheon-gun and Nara Foundation. Ticket: tariffs not published in the sources consulted — ask the organizer. Photo credit: ice fishing on the frozen Hwacheoncheon, January 2023 — Korean Culture and Information Service (Kim Sunjoo), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.