Nearly two years after its original opening deadline, a major North Korean beach resort is showing signs of progress — all while the country juggles other topline construction projects and grapples with an economy squeezed by COVID-19.

According to NK Pro analysis of satellite imagery, there are now signs that thousands of workers stationed at the sprawling Wonsan-Kalma Coastal Tourist Area are moving out after large parts of temporary camps surrounding the zone were removed in the first half of March. Dump trucks also moved around inside the camps and near hotels located inside the zone in February.

The Wonsan-Kalma project is set to be North Korea’s largest-ever tourist zone, containing thousands of hotel rooms, multiple shopping malls, waterparks and dozens of other attractions meant to bring in serious cash from abroad. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un originally demanded the resort open in April 2019 — a timeline that only allowed 15 months for construction. But Kim ended up announcing two delays and publicly ignoring the project when it missed its most recent April 2020 deadline.

“Kim Jong Un takes a lot of personal interest in this resort. It’s sort of like a personal pet project of the supreme leader,” Fyodor Tertitskiy, a leading researcher at Kookmin University in Seoul, told NK Pro. “He has given instructions on it and spoken about it a lot in state media.”

After April 2020, North Korea never announced a new deadline for the resort project, and work slowed to a crawl after the country enacted COVID-19-related restrictions like an ongoing national border lockdown at the beginning of last year. Over the summer, the government also diverted some soldier worker units from Wonsan to disaster recovery sites after a spate of storms devastated several regions. 

Most of the zone already appeared nearly complete from the outside when the April 2020 deadline passed, but by Feb. 2021, cranes were still attached to towering hotels while an aquatic-themed arena remained as a bare concrete shell, high-resolution Planet Labs satellite imagery showed. Meanwhile, the state of millions of square feet of interiors is unknown due to the lack of state media coverage of the project.

“Exterior construction is relatively easier to do on these projects than finishing the inside of the resort,” said Peter Ward, a researcher on the North Korean economy and a contributing analyst to NK Pro. “The missed deadline means that [North Korea] is in quite a lot of economic pain, and that pain certainly didn’t start with COVID. It’s longstanding.”

However, some progress was made in recent months before the latest construction worker camps were removed, according to satellite imagery. For example, new roofing was installed in Nov. 2020 on a pyramid-shaped indoor waterpark located on the north end of the resort zone. More recently, throughout Feb. 2021, construction trucks were seen changing positions in front of smaller hotels on the north end, as well.

The removal of the worker camps then began between Feb. 24 and March 9 along the western edge of the Kalma Peninsula, next to the modern “international” airport that has laid dormant since it opened in 2015, Planet Labs medium-resolution imagery showed. Another large section of the main workers’ camp located just south of the zone then disappeared by March 14.

Large parts of the camps still remained intact as of March 24, but their eventual complete removal would signal the imminent opening of the Wonsan-Kalma zone, since temporary structures at other top-priority construction projects have historically been cleared almost directly prior to official opening ceremonies. 

However, the process at Wonsan has so far been gradual: A large section of temporary structures was already removed in May 2020, and Planet Labs imagery showed that additional smaller sections of the camps around the peninsula either disappeared or were relocated throughout the rest of the year. 

Kim Jong Un has not directly mentioned the project since the end of 2019, but he indicated that it was still a top priority in his recent Jan. 2021 speech.

In the speech, Kim said that he wants to “spruce up the country’s coastal areas as befits a maritime nation,” and added that boosting tourism is “an important undertaking” for both improving the lives of North Koreans and for “showing the world the ever-improving appearances of our country.”

Another sign that tourism-related construction on the east coast is set for a major boost came earlier this month, when top leaders of the country’s Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) adopted a “master plan” specifically for “land development in the east coastal area.” 

But there are also signs North Korea may soon begin multiple large, new beach tourism projects south of Wonsan-Kalma: During his Eighth Party Congress speech in January, Kim spoke at length about plans for the Mount Kumgang area, which is located just a few miles up the coast from the inter-Korean border. About a month prior, top official Kim Tok Hun had also inspected potential construction sites for these projects along the shoreline.

For now, satellite imagery suggests that the Wonsan-Kalma resort project will not open by April 15, one year after its latest deadline and two years after it was originally set to open its gates. Kim has not visited the zone since April 2019, and North Korea also missed another key deadline for its Pyongyang General Hospital project last October. 

“This is an important flagship project for the regime,” Ward said. “It’s a convenient location for many Chinese tourists to visit, but heaven knows when that will happen.”

Edited by Kelly Kasulis