Gwangyang Maehwa Village & Cheong Maesil Farm

Character

About 2,500 traditional onggi jars stand behind the plum slopes at Cheong Maesil Farm. The same trees that turn the hills around Seomjin Village white in March produce the fruit harvested in early summer, so Gwangyang’s famous spring landscape is also the first visible stage of a working food economy

That link between blossom and crop is unusually explicit here. Gwangyang describes the village as a landscape of roughly 100,000 plum trees, while the farm itself spreads across more than 165,000 square metres below Baegunsan. The white and red blossom fields, bamboo, earthen jars and the Seomjingang River are not separate attractions assembled for visitors; they belong to one agricultural landscape built around maesil

Hong Ssang-ri made that landscape nationally recognizable by treating the fruit as something to process, explain and sell as well as grow. Her farm developed plum extracts, pickles, sauces and other products, and the story of that work became part of the visitor experience through tours, exhibitions and food culture

The experience

The Place is distributed rather than enclosed. Seomjin Village spreads along the lower slopes above the river, with orchards occupying working farmland and Cheong Maesil Farm forming the best-known concentration within it. From the farm’s pavilion observatory, the view opens across the village and Seomjingang toward Hadong on the opposite bank

The season changes what the same terrain means. March is dominated by blossom, with the farm and surrounding village becoming one of Korea’s major spring-flower destinations. By June, the emphasis moves to the fruit itself: VisitKorea lists plum-picking during the harvest period, and the agricultural side of the landscape becomes easier to read once the flowers have gone

The onggi jars provide the clearest physical bridge between those two identities. Gwangyang records around 2,500 traditional jars used in plum-food production behind the farm, set against bamboo and old plum trees. They turn processing into part of the visible landscape instead of hiding it behind an industrial building

History

The orchard story begins before the modern tourism brand. Cheong Maesil Farm traces its first generation to Kim Oh-cheon, who returned to the area in 1931 and planted plum and chestnut trees while promoting improved farming methods. Gwangyang credits the farm with beginning Korea’s earliest large-scale group cultivation of plum trees, and some of Kim’s old trees remain part of the site

Hong Ssang-ri entered that agricultural system in 1965, when she married into a hillside farm already planted with about 10,000 chestnut trees and 2,000 plum trees. She expanded the plum orchards, improved varieties and pushed the crop further into processed food. In 1997 she was designated a traditional-food master, formal recognition of a career that had made maesil processing as important to the farm’s identity as cultivation

Tourism grew from the same work. A farm-run blossom festival began in 1995; Gwangyang took the event citywide from 1997. The festival eventually became one of the best-known spring events in southern Korea, but its visual spectacle still depends on orchards whose trees continue into a second annual cycle of fruit harvest and processing

A 2010 Korea Rural Economic Institute study used Cheong Maesil Farm as a case of turning a local agricultural resource into cultural content. It identified festivals, tours, experiences, exhibitions and Hong’s own life story as parts of the farm’s development. The tourism layer did not replace the crop economy; it grew out of the methods used to give that crop a public identity

Before you go

Maehwa Village and Cheong Maesil Farm overlap visually but are not one controlled site. The village is a working settlement and agricultural landscape, while the farm is a separate operating property inside it. Blossom season brings the heaviest concentration of visitors and traffic; outside that period, the same slopes are quieter and the production side of the place is easier to notice