Hwacheon Sancheonjae Festival, the representative winter festival of Korea, held a spectacular show today (5th).

Hwacheon is only 27,000 people, but today the festival hall was filled with crowds gathered from all over the country.

The festivals opened in the morning, and the morning temperatures dropped to minus 7 degrees.

Some of the gangsters fell down on Hwacheon, which was frozen, and pushed their faces near the ice hole and watched as the mountain passed.

The mountain fish that passed under the ice packed the bait, and the young children who watched it cheered with Dad.

The tourists who broke out enjoyed the fished fish at the on-site restaurant and enjoyed the festival.

The Sancheonjae Festival, which the government has designated as the "Korea representative festival" for the fifth consecutive year, will take place in the Hwacheon and Hwacheon-eup areas for 23 days until the 27th.

The Hwacheon Sancheonjae Festival, which celebrates its 16th anniversary this year, is a global winter festival that has attracted more than one million people every year since its first festival in 2003.

This year, Hwacheon, the fishing ground of the festival hall, was frozen to a thickness of about 30cm.

It is because of the strong winds that have passed since last month.

Hwacheon County greeted tourists through 20,000 ice holes in 24 ice fields.

Reservation Fishing, which was applied in advance ahead of the festival, was closed early.

For this reason, the fishermen who applied immediately on the spot were crowded early as tourists who wanted to get tickets from 8 am.

Many tourists participated in the experience of catching the bamboo fish which attracted great popularity every year. We enjoyed the unique memories by catching fish by entering cold water by wearing short sleeves and shorts.

Tourists have not stopped at the city center venues linked to festivals such as the Ice Sledding and the Suh Volcano Multipurpose Square.

The festival hall and neighboring shopping districts are showing special festivals to tourists.

The festival program covers more than 60 species, including ice fishing, mountain breeze fishing, lure fishing, sledding, ice sculpture, and creative sled contests.

In particular, this year, we expanded nighttime events such as night fishing to increase the number of visitors.

If you stay in the area, you will receive a free admission ticket for night fishing.

Participating in a festivals experience event will bring back half of the cost to the gift certificate that can be used in Hwacheon area.

Events for foreigners are more abundant.

Hwacheon started focusing on overseas marketing focusing on foreigners' winter festival.

For more than a decade, I focused on Southeast Asia without snow and ice.

We have established close partnerships with local major travel agencies, have Thai and Chinese SNS accounts, and have secured more than 30,000 followers.

In fact, Southeast Asian travel agencies are launching travel tourism products including the Hwacheon Sancheonjae Festival.

Thanks to this, the number of foreign tourists who visited during the festival exceeded 100,000 for the first time in 2017, and recorded more than 110,000 last year.

We celebrate the opening of the festival with colorful fireworks in the middle of this afternoon at 6:00 pm with Hwacheon county and residents.

(Photo: Yonhap News)