Gwangyang Plum Blossom Festival, from Tickets to the Green Plum Orchard

This is a visit report on the 25th Gwangyang Plum Blossom Festival, held March 13 to 22, 2026. It covers the temporary parking lot and shuttle bus, the 6,000 KRW ticket (which comes with a 6,000 KRW voucher), and the walking route through Maehwa Village and the green plum orchard.

Hi, I’m CULT.
I went to the Gwangyang Plum Blossom Festival on March 13, 2026. It was actually my first time. Back in 2014, when I lived in Korea, I came out to the Gurye and Hadong area a few times to take flower photos, but I’d never been to Maehwa Village in Gwangyang. That day I was out scouting around for a good place for photo shoots, and I heard the festival was running until the 22nd, so I dropped by.

You know what a plum blossom is, right? The flower of the tree that bears green plums (maesil) is called a plum blossom (maehwa). It looks similar to a cherry blossom, but it’s definitely a different flower. In Korea, the basic flowering rule is that the cherry blossoms only come out once the plum blossoms have all fallen.

The plum blossoms were really pretty, so visiting as a family would be nice too. From all the flower photo shoots I’ve done, I’ve found that an only daughter enjoys these outings much more than an only son does. When boys and girls are together, the boys sometimes get swept along and end up enjoying it, but a boy visiting without a sibling usually reacts with a bit of a shrug.

The 2026 Gwangyang Plum Blossom Festival ran from March 13 to 22. It’s in Gwangyang, Jeonnam (South Jeolla Province). Access may be a little harder for people in the Seoul metropolitan area, but for people in Gyeongnam (South Gyeongsang Province) or Jeonnam it’s a good place to squeeze in a quick weekend trip.
Maybe because it was the 25th edition, the festival ran with a fair amount of polish overall. I lived in Japan for 1 year and 3 months and went to festivals there fairly often, and Japanese festivals are insanely well run. The Korean festivals I saw before I left Korea were all over the place, as chaotic as a newly opened department store, but there was almost none of that atmosphere here.

The parking lot is.. seriously huge. At least it looks like you won’t need to worry about parking.. like I said.. this was the 25th edition, remember? They must have gone through a lot of trial and error.. maybe that’s why.. they built a ridiculously big parking lot.. Not even Japan could pull this off.. and Europe, obviously, no chance..
So.. well.. I don’t think you need to worry about parking at all. Of course, the parking lot is 2 km from Maehwa Village.. but just eyeballing it, at least 5 shuttle buses were running nonstop.. probably more. The buses circulate all day long.

I just took this photo to capture the plum blossoms.. but somehow it turned into a photo showing how big the parking lot is..
You see the cars parked on the lot behind the tree, right? In reality, the lot is about twice as big as the one you see in the photo. And there’s another lot just this big to the left of the photo -_-;;

Follow the arrows and you can catch the shuttle bus, and wherever you look, there’s a staff member within 100 meters. There are lots of them. If you ask where to catch the shuttle bus, they’ll point you to it. I brought my bike and rode it. If you walk.. you might end up fighting a war with the kids.. so just take the shuttle bus.

This is scenery you miss if you take the shuttle bus. I wandered along the stream a bit. Of course.. the view once you get to Maehwa Village is prettier. Out of habit I’m always scouting for good places for photo shoots, so I poke around every nook like this. Occupational hazard.

When I took this photo I wondered how it would be to shoot here.. but the composition is really not good. It’s pretty, sure, but it would eat up too much time for a shoot.. so yeah.. just going to Maehwa Village to shoot is the best.

Gyeongnam and eastern Jeonnam definitely seem to get nicer weather overall than the Seoul metropolitan area. The reason I chose the south of Korea, instead of the Seoul metropolitan area where I have ties and acquaintances and could get help with work, is that.. it’s easy to see blue skies like this here. The Seoul metropolitan area.. the sky is so stifling and a bit gray-toned..

You have to buy a ticket here. It’s 6,000 KRW.
Both cards and cash work. But cash only at the cash booth and cards only at the card booth, so look carefully. I think the split is because of foreigners. I wonder if it’s to accommodate visitors from Southeast Asia, where debit and credit cards are hard to get, and tourists from Japan, where people use cards less and rely heavily on QR payments.

The ticket is 6,000 KRW, but it comes with a voucher worth 6,000 KRW. So it’s basically free admission. No regrets at all, and the money ends up going back to local merchants anyway. There are quite a few shops tied to the organizers, and you can use the voucher to pay for 6,000 KRW worth of purchases there.
Looking at the prices of the food and snacks, nothing felt particularly expensive; I think they’re reasonable. These days it’s a scary world where one price-gouging controversy gets you carpet-bombed with criticism, preserved on YouTube forever, and ruined for good..

So.. the bus stops here and drops off everyone who came from the parking lot.
Regular cars can’t get this far, but I noticed that buses carrying group tourists from Seoul can come all the way in. Buses are the only exception.

Maybe because it has a good number of years behind it and it’s a fairly big festival, they’re selling lots of local specialty products too. You can get a discount with that 6,000 KRW ticket from before, or buy 6,000 KRW worth of goods. If I were someone involved with this event, I’d shorten the banner that says “Farm and Specialty Products Sales” to just “Specialty Products Sales.”
Because when you say “farm and specialty products”.. it sounds like they’re selling things that are a hassle to carry home, like radishes or carrots at a market.

If you head to the middle of the plaza.. you can play simple games like these.
Do them.. and you get a souvenir. It’s nothing grand, but from a foreigner’s point of view it can be a great gift.
Among BTS ARMY fans in Europe, the hippest item is the reusable tote bag sold at E-Mart in Korea.. Koreans might think it’s nothing special, but a foreigner’s perspective is different.

It’s simple and not hard.. failing or whatever.. if you try a few times and can’t do it, they just stamp it for you.
Here’s my theory.. why do they do this.. When one or two shuttle buses arrive, about 40-80 people pour out all at once, and if all of them keep flowing into Maehwa Village at the same time, the festival experience itself would get worse, so it looks like a deliberate attempt to spread the tourists out.
I get that feeling from how they’ve laid out so many souvenir, specialty product, and food stalls at the village entrance, like a defensive line holding back the crowds.

Maehwa Village itself is small, but there are lots of tourists, so it looks like the strategy is to control the rate at which people flow in.

When I lived in Korea over 10 years ago.. I always felt that local festivals and events were so shoddy, like, how can you run things this badly.. but now I’m like, oh nice, they’ve really come a long way~?

There are three games, but you don’t need to do them all. Playing just two is enough.
Then you use the stamped coupon to turn the handle on the prize draw machine, and the ball’s color determines which souvenir you get.

It’s called the Maesuni keyring.
A green plum with a plum blossom on it 😀

Another souvenir is a reusable tote bag.
A reusable tote bag is something foreign visitors might like. Something you can’t buy with money, yet it lets you brag that you’ve done some traveling in Korea.

Gwangyang lunch box, 6,000 KRW.
There was a huge variety of food, but since it was exactly 6,000 KRW, I settled on this for a combined breakfast and lunch.

At 6,000 KRW, there’s no reason to complain. It tasted pretty decent too. Not particularly salty, either.
The reason I picked this is that Cultravel gets translated into 9 languages, so I have to consider whether the food might be too spicy for readers in those languages, or whether their cultures avoid particular foods. Man.. what a headache..

On the way here there were lots of cherry blossom-lined roads, and I bet the road here will be pretty at the end of March too. The beautifully landscaped, tree-lined roads on the way to Maehwa Village go on for a looong way, you know? They’re as pretty as these red plum blossoms. This town lives off cherry blossoms and plum blossoms, after all.
This area is famous for plum blossoms and cherry blossoms. Since I already knew that, even when I spent four months on Jeju Island I couldn’t help reacting with “so what’s so pretty about Jeju?” There’s no need to go all the way to Jeju Island just to see pretty places.

As for cherry blossoms, Hadong is simply the best. It’s the town right next to Gwangyang’s Maehwa Village.

If you follow where people are going, you can roughly guess where to head.
One disappointing thing about this festival is the lack of signposts, so anyone who doesn’t speak Korean is bound to get lost. You can follow the flow, but I got a bit lost inside the village and nearly ended up in another village..

There’s a monument commemorating the first person who planted plum trees in this village, and big plum trees around it. The flowers are blooming profusely.

What’s nice about plum trees is that the trees themselves are short, so it’s really easy to photograph kids with the blossoms.
Korean cherry trees are incredibly pretty.. but the flowers bloom so high up.. that you’re forced to take a wide-angle shot, while plum blossoms don’t have that problem. So easy to shoot..

Getting around here with a stroller might be a bit difficult. Still, if you have a baby, bringing a stroller is absolutely better. Just walking around takes about 30 minutes, but that’s really just looking around.. the plum blossoms are gorgeous and make a lovely backdrop, so if you take photos with flowers in the background here and there, an hour or two goes by quickly.
Standing for a couple of hours with a baby bundled in a baby carrier? Ugh. Just imagining it is exhausting,
Of course there are really lots of places to rest, eat, or drink. Still, I think holding a baby the whole time is an even harder choice than a stroller. Of course, there are places a stroller can’t go. The paths in the plum orchard are unpaved.. but you can park the stroller and just go take photos of the pretty spots and come back.

As you go up, shops run separately by the villagers instead of the organizers gradually start to appear. Here, places start popping up one by one that don’t accept the 6,000 KRW voucher that comes with your ticket. I got a slight feeling that prices were a bit higher too.. but it’s not like I felt it was crazy expensive.

You have to walk up a bit to reach the entrance.
It was the middle of the day on a Friday.. wow.. quite a lot of people. So if you’re planning a photo shoot, mornings may be a better choice. This was around noon so it was probably more crowded.. Still, there are lots of shops around, and they keep people occupied, so it wasn’t a big hassle to enjoy the plum blossoms in the village.

The stone wall lane is nicely done, too.
The scent of green plums must be amazing here in summer..

There’s a dad pushing a stroller on the right.
A stroller is definitely better than a baby carrier. At the entrance here I saw a couple who’d carried their baby on their back in a wrap.. and the mom said.. “Should we just turn back at the entrance?” Understandable.. the slope is quite steep..
If you just zip around without doing anything, it takes about 30 minutes. Like I said earlier, with photos and sightseeing and everything, it takes an hour or two.

This is what you travel to see. And what’s this, some kind of folk village up ahead.. well.. they’re all selling stuff like makgeolli..

So this is where they took the photos in the articles promoting the Gwangyang Plum Blossom Festival.

Green plums.. no wonder they sell so many.. the whole mountain is plum trees..

Looking at it like this.. Korea can be pretty great, too.

I took this photo because I thought it would be a lovely spot for a photo shoot. It’s near the top.. so I’d do it toward the end of a shoot..

I went up the wrong hill.. and I’m photographing some weird place.
By the way.. I wheeled my bike up here.

This is Sundori, a high-class Korean dog of the “Sigorjabjong” breed (a playful rendering of the Korean for “village mutt”).
When I jokingly called it a Sigorjabjong, people actually thought it was a real breed.. but.. at this rate Sigorjabjong might really become its scientific name..

This was around 1 p.m.. wow.. so many people.
Still.. the higher you go, the fewer people there are, probably because some turn back midway..

Gwangyang’s Maehwa Village is really pretty. There are lots of people, too, but not so crowded that you can’t take photos. I don’t know if it was the organizers’ plan, but I think the many shops actually spread people out, and I thought the plum blossom viewing experience was pretty good.

It’s a pretty decent festival, so make time to visit at least once in the next plum blossom season.

The Maehwa Village I walked around that day was also a great place for a family photo shoot. The festival is already over, but I’ll keep doing photo shoots that capture the natural moments of families and babies in places with flowers in bloom like this, and at local festivals. I let the baby play however they like and take photos from a short distance away, and a 1-hour shoot comes with 20 edited photos and 300 original photos. You can see photos of a family with a 14-month-old baby, taken under the plum trees, in Changwon First Birthday Photo Shoot, Under the Gwangyang Plum Blossoms.