Busan's pastel hillside
Gamcheon
A steep neighbourhood of small box-like houses painted in pastels, turned into an art village in 2009.
Why Gamcheon is pastel blue
Gamcheon covers a steep valley side in Busan, South Korea's second city. It was settled in the 1950s by refugees of the Korean War, many of them followers of a religious movement called Taegeukdo. They built small houses in stepped rows so that none blocked the one behind. For decades it was a poor district. In 2009 an arts project brought students, artists and residents together to paint houses and place sculptures and murals along the alleys. The houses are now pale blue, pink, yellow and green, stacked like building blocks. Visitors follow a stamp trail through the lanes. People still live here, and signs ask for quiet.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Written by the EveryRang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Gamcheon Culture Village" on Wikipedia. If you know Gamcheon and we have it wrong, tell us.
More colour cities
All colour cities
đ°đˇ Seoul's village of grey tiled roofsBukchonA hillside quarter of traditional Korean houses with dark grey tiled roofs, between two royal palaces.
đŽđł The Blue CityJodhpurOld-city houses washed in blue crowd the foot of Mehrangarh Fort, on the edge of the Thar Desert.đŽđł Town of mud-resist block printBagruA small town near Jaipur where the Chhipa community prints cotton by hand in indigo, black and red.
đŽđł Prayer flags over a high desertLehStrings of five-coloured prayer flags and white stupas stand out against the brown mountains of Ladakh.
đľđ° City of saints and blue tilesMultanBrick shrines of Sufi saints are banded with blue, turquoise and white tiles, a craft still alive in the city.
đ˛đŚ The Blue PearlChefchaouenA mountain town in northern Morocco whose lanes, steps and doors are washed in many shades of blue.Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Jodhpur In: Lavpatel2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Leh In: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, source
- Multan Pk: Yaarahmadd, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Bukchon Kr: kallerna, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Chefchaouen Ma: Ismailbrk, CC BY-SA 4.0, source