Gongjin does not exist: the Pohang market town behind Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha

At the edge of the market yard in Cheongha, a farming town in the north of Pohang (포항), a statue of a squid stands on a plinth. The sea is a few kilometres east and out of sight. The statue was made for a television series, to mark the centre of a fishing village called Gongjin. Gongjin does not exist. The market around the squid does, and it was trading long before the cameras arrived.

A market that kept its costume

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha (갯마을 차차차, Gaetmaeul Cha-Cha-Cha) tells the story of a Seoul dentist who opens a clinic in Gongjin and keeps running into the village odd-job man. For Gongjin's main street the production used Cheongha Market (청하시장) in Cheongha-myeon (청하면), repainting shopfronts and hanging new signboards over real ones. When filming ended, several were left up. Local reporting has continued to find the Cheongho Hardware (청호철물) sign and the squid in place, and Bora Supermarket (보라슈퍼) selling old-fashioned sweets and toys rather than groceries.

The sign over a door and the business behind it do not always agree. Gongjin Banjeom (공진반점), the Chinese restaurant the hero delivers for, still wears a Chinese-restaurant façade, but local accounts describe the kitchen behind it as known for gomtang (곰탕), a long-simmered beef bone soup. Read the menu on the wall before you order. The café signed 한낮엔 커피 달밤엔 맥주, which means coffee at midday and beer by moonlight, is the same kind of case: it may be pouring coffee the day you come, or it may be shuttered. Shopfronts in a small town change hands, and no single sign should be the reason for the trip.

공진은 지도에 없지만, 청하시장은 닷새마다 선다.

Every fifth day, and the other four

Cheongha is an oiljang (오일장), a market that convenes on a five-day cycle rather than daily. On market days the lanes around the yard fill from early morning. Sellers sit low beside basins of greens and roots, dried fish comes in from the coast, and a few stalls hang work trousers and kitchen tools from poles. Prices are spoken, not posted. Cash is the working assumption, and small notes make everything quicker.

On the other four days the yard is mostly a car park with a squid in it. Many shutters stay down, a handful of permanent shops keep their doors open, and the street is quiet enough to photograph without a person in the frame. Visitors who come only for the drama often prefer this. They leave having seen the set and missed the market. Given a choice, come on a market day and come in the morning, because rural sellers tend to pack up once lunch has passed.

The clinic by the harbour, the boat on the hill

The series cut freely between the market and the coast, as though one were a short stroll from the other. On the ground they are a drive apart. The building dressed as the dental clinic stands at Cheongjin harbour (청진항), a small working port with a breakwater, stacked nets and boats tied close together. It is a village building, not an exhibit, and the view is from the outside. The harbour is worth ten slow minutes for its own sake.

Further south along the coast road, in Odo-ri (오도리), is Sabang Memorial Park (사방기념공원). Sabang means erosion control, and the park commemorates the replanting of hills here that were once bare, with terraced slopes laid out to show how the work was done. Above them sits the fishing boat the series used as its hero's hilltop retreat, hull propped on the grass, bow pointed at the East Sea. Local authorities said at the time that the boat and the squid would be kept. The climb is short and exposed, and the wind up there is stronger than it looks from the car park.

The houses are not sets

The heroine's house, the hero's house and the grandmother's house were private homes, rented for the length of the shoot and handed back. People live in them. While the series was still on air, the production publicly asked visitors to keep away, because residents were finding strangers at their gates. That request has not expired because the broadcast has.

Pins for these houses circulate on Korean blogs and map apps. A pin is not an invitation. The market, the harbour and the park are public and give you most of what the screen showed. In the village lanes between them, a low wall is a boundary, voices carry further than you expect, and many of the people on the other side of the wall are elderly. Keep the camera pointed at the sea.

What this coast offers without the drama

Near Cheongha the shore opens into Wolpo Beach (월포해수욕장), a long curve of sand with a railway station close behind it. A little south, the Igari Anchor Observatory (이가리 닻 전망대) is a walkway built out over the rocks in the shape of an anchor, with clear water underneath on a calm day. Inland, Bogyeongsa (보경사) sits at the foot of Naeyeonsan (내연산), where a valley trail climbs past a chain of waterfalls. Either makes a half-day that owes nothing to television.

Eat mulhoe (물회) while you are here. Pohang's version is sliced raw fish and shredded vegetables under a cold, red, gochujang-based sauce, with rice or noodles stirred in at the table; it began as a meal fishermen could make on deck. In the cold months the local order is gwamegi (과메기), half-dried herring or saury wrapped in seaweed with garlic and chives. Its home port is Guryongpo, at the far southern end of the same coastline.

Getting there and getting it right

KTX trains run from Seoul Station (서울역) to Pohang Station (포항역), which stands in the north of the city, already on the Cheongha side. City buses continue north along National Route 7 towards the market. Wolpo Station (월포역) on the Donghae Line is closer still, though only some trains stop there, so check the Korail timetable before building a day around it. Naver Map and KakaoMap show live bus arrivals far more reliably than foreign map apps do in Korea.

The locations are strung along many kilometres of coast, and buses between the villages are infrequent. A rental car collected at Pohang Station, or a taxi engaged for a half-day, is the realistic way to see the market, the harbour and the park together; ask the driver how the fare will be worked out before you set off. Spring and autumn give the clearest light. Summer weekends bring beach traffic to Wolpo, and winter brings a hard wind and the gwamegi season.

Market dates, parking charges at the park and any temple admission at Bogyeongsa should be confirmed with Pohang's official tourism information or the Korea Tourism Organization's 1330 helpline, which answers in English. The mistake to avoid is arriving as if Gongjin were a theme park with a gate. It is a town with a market, and the market is the better reason to come.