Kim Jong-Un’s missile test site beach resort is delayed again

Kim Jong-Un’s ‘Benidorm-style’ beach resort on a stretch of coast once used for missile tests is delayed again as North Korea is forced to seek help from Chinese backers

•  North Korea’s ‘Benidorm’ resort has missed its second completion deadline
•  Originally meant to be finished in April this year the date is now set for 2020
•  It has been suggested that the resort is being made to attract South Koreans

By John Bennett For Mailonline

Published: 11:57 BST, 1 September 2019 | Updated: 12:06 BST, 1 September 2019

North Korea has been left begging for extra cash from Chinese backers after its missile test sight turned beach resort has been delayed again. 

Kim Jong-Un had originally ordered the site, near the city of Wonson, to be finished by April this year but the project deadline had to be pushed back to October 10th.

Now the deadline has been extended again by the supreme leader who has told his workers not to proceed ‘in a hurried way’ but to ‘postpone the construction’ until April 15, 2020.

The dictator has blamed ‘hostile forces’ and ‘vicious sanctions’, and promising to ‘astonish the world’ come the new deadline date. 

Now the hermit kingdom is seeking Chinese backers ‘to invest in hotels, tourist attractions, and infrastructure.’ 

Construction on the North Korean resort has once again failed to meet its deadline it is expected to be finished in April 2020

Kim Chun Hui, a director in the regime’s National Tourism Administration, specifically named the Wonsan resort in an interview with Chinese media. 

In the article she admitted that ‘there are many areas in the North Korean tourism industry that need improvement, such as poor infrastructure.’

Adding: ‘the North Korean government welcomes Chinese entrepreneurs and will provide various preferential measures for investment companies.’ 

Despite the delays, the regime boasted in a recent propaganda broadcast that work at the resort was proceeding without a hitch. 

Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un has reportedly asked for workers not to be ‘hurried’ in their approach to their task

The project came to be known as North Korea’s answer to Benidorm after Pyongyang reportedly sent officials on a fact-finding mission to Spain’s Costa Blanca in 2017. 

Simon Cockerell, general manager of Koryo Tours, has travelled to North Korea more than 175 times and thinks the new resort will prove to be ‘a bit quieter’. 

He said: ‘I would imagine it will have fewer bars, I mean they tend to keep things fairly restrained and conservative.’ 

‘It’s mostly people going in the sea for a bit and then sitting on the beach for a bit, so I imagine the only things making it similar to Benidorm is that it’s buildings near some sand.’ 

Nonetheless, he said conditions could be just right for sun-worshippers. 

‘In the summer it’s very hot so there’d be a couple of months a year that’d be prime beach weather.’ 

He said: ‘The beaches in North Korea – when they’re busy, they’re not even that busy.’ 

The delay has been blamed in part to ‘vicious sanctions’ from ‘hostile forces’ outside of North Korea

It has been suggested that the resort’s large scale has been designed for the South Korean tourist market rather than the rest of the world

‘You could either choose between sharing it with a few people or having it all to yourself, which is what it would likely be at the new resort, I think.’ 

Mr Cockerell believes that the resort is being built with future South Korean visitors in mind. Between 1998 and 2008, holidaymakers from the South were allowed to visit a specially-designated section of the North, the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region.

 Mr Cockerell said: ‘It’s almost certainly being built for the future of South Korean tourists visiting, and domestic tourists as well.’ 

The long beaches near Wonsan had previously been used as a missile testing site but has since been paved over

‘There’s nobody else who has the volume or potential volume of tourists to actually fill such a place or even partly fill such a place.’ 

‘It’s hard to see who else it would be for. The scale of the place is too big to be built for Western or Chinese tourists.’ 

‘They’re talking about capacity of four or five thousand people at any one time. That’s the entire non-Chinese tourist market in a year, so there’s just absolutely no need for that.’  

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