Daegu
Bắc Gyeongsang
Choi2451 · CC BY-SA 3.0
A basin city known as Korea's hottest, with an old textile market and the country's spiciest food.
Daegu sits in a bowl of mountains, so its summers are hot enough that Koreans joke about 'Daefrica'. It was long the centre of textiles and of the peninsula's largest herbal medicine market — Yangnyeongsi still smells of liquorice. The food is hot and salty: spicy noodles, beef bone soup, grilled offal. And the city is ringed by mountains, with Palgongsan and Apsan half an hour away.
Best time to visit: April–May and September–November
Local specialties
- Daegu spicy noodles
- Beef bone soup
- Chive pancakes
- Grilled makchang
Places (9)
Seomun Market
Daegu's oldest cloth market, which becomes one of Korea's best night markets after dark.
Biseulsan Azalea Ridge
Thirty hectares of azalea on a plateau near the summit, turning the whole tableland pink each April.
Yangnyeongsi Herbal Medicine Market
A herbal medicine street trading since 1658, where the whole quarter smells of drying roots.
Apsan Park
The mountain on the city's southern edge, with a cable car to a viewpoint over all of Daegu.
Bullo-dong Tumuli Park
Two hundred grass-covered burial mounds on a hill in the suburbs, and almost nobody there.
Daegu Modern History Alleys
A walking route past a red-brick church, missionary houses and the ninety steps schoolchildren used in 1919.
Palgongsan & the Gatbawi Buddha
A stone Buddha wearing a stone hat on a mountain top, said to grant each visitor one wish.
Kim Kwang-seok Street
A 350-metre alley honouring the singer who put a generation's sadness into song.
Daegu Arboretum
The city's rubbish tip for seven years, now an arboretum with more than eighteen hundred plant species.