A view of the 2025 Kimcheon Gimbap Festival held around the Jikjisa Cultural Park and Samyeongsa Park in Kimcheon, North Gyeongsang Province.
GIMCHEON, Oct. 26 (Korea Bizwire) — Kimcheon’s annual celebration of its most famous street food has quickly turned into a crowd-control challenge.
The 2025 Kimcheon Gimbap Festival opened Saturday in the southeastern city of roughly 134,500 residents, drawing an estimated 80,000 visitors on its first day alone, according to city officials. The two-day festival, now in its second year, spans the Jikjisa Cultural Park and Samyeongsa Park.
By Sunday morning, city authorities issued multiple emergency alerts urging drivers to avoid the festival area due to mounting congestion.
Access to the venue was restricted to visitors taking shuttle buses from major sites including Kimcheon Sports Town, the city hall, and the KTX station. Organizers also capped purchases at four rolls of gimbap per person to slow product shortages.
Last year’s inaugural event recorded 100,000 attendees over two days. Local officials had expected similar turnout this year, but the surge of visitors early Saturday forced them to provide real-time notices of sold-out vendors and overcrowded queues.
Frustrated festivalgoers flooded the city’s social-media pages with complaints about long waits and tangled pedestrian lines, with some urging officials to extend the festival to ease future demand.
The showcase includes more than 50 varieties of gimbap, from regional specialties to national chain offerings and even frozen versions aimed at international visitors. The standout attraction is the walnut-mayo pork gimbap, a winner of a cooking competition organized by the city.
Kimcheon officials say the idea for the festival emerged from a survey of younger consumers, who associated the city with the ubiquitous budget eatery “Gimbap Heaven.” City leaders embraced the playful branding as a shot at boosting tourism.
The festivities come on the heels of a water-safety scare, after larvae-like material was reportedly found in the municipal supply earlier this month. To reassure attendees, the city required all drinking and cooking water used at the festival to come from bottled sources.
Image credit: Yonhap, City of Gimcheon / photonews@koreabizwire.com
