Daejeon
Chungcheong
Yoo Chung · CC BY-SA 3.0
A science city at Korea's railway crossroads, famous for a bakery the whole country queues at.
Daejeon grew out of a railway station: every north–south line passes through, which made the city the country's transfer point. From the 1970s the Daedeok research complex and KAIST turned it into Korea's centre of science and technology. For a traveller, Daejeon is a very easy half-day: the Expo park by the river, Gyeryongsan mountain half an hour away, and Sungsimdang bakery, for which Koreans will happily stand in line for an hour.
Best time to visit: April–May and September–November
Local specialties
- Sungsimdang bread
- Daejeon bone-broth soup
- Hand-cut noodles at Jungang Market
Places (7)
Expo Science Park & Expo Bridge
The legacy of the 1993 World Expo, now a science park on the Gapcheon river.
Daejeon Jungang Market
The largest traditional market in central Korea — and the bakery people queue an hour for.
Ppuri Park (Roots Park)
The world's only park devoted to clans, with stones carved with the crests of two hundred Korean lineages.
Daecheongho Lake & Lakeside Road
The reservoir supplying central Korea, with a lakeside road counted among the country's finest drives.
Eunhaeng-dong & Sky Road
A two-hundred-metre LED canopy over an old pedestrian street, playing films above people's heads.
Jangtaesan Metasequoia Forest
Thousands of metasequoias planted in rows, with a walkway suspended fourteen metres up in the canopy.
Gyeryongsan National Park
A ridge shaped like a cockscomb on a dragon's back, long held to be the most sacred mountain in central Korea.