Imsil Cheese Village

Geumseong-ri built its own cheese village

The current Cheese Village grew out of Geumseong-ri’s Neuti Village. Residents planted zelkova trees in 1982, organized an eco-farming group in 1991, began Korea’s first mozzarella-making visitor program in 2001, and formally created a rural-experience village in 2003

Imsil’s cheese history is older than the village brand. Belgian priest Didier t'Serstevens, better known in Korea as Ji Jeong-hwan, began experimenting with goat milk in Imsil in the 1960s after arriving in a poor mountain county. Two goats became a cooperative dairy project, and by the late 1960s Imsil had Korea’s pioneering cheese production

The first factory is a separate historical site

The original factory and aging tunnel associated with Ji’s early cheese-making survive in Seongga-ri, away from today’s visitor village in Geumseong-ri. The village’s own history program makes that separation explicit: its three-hour heritage tour moves by car from Cheese Village to the historical cheese spaces about 15 minutes away

The present village is a later community project built around the industry Ji and local farmers started; the original factory remains a separate heritage stop. In 2007 residents changed the village name from Neuti Cheese Village to Imsil Cheese Village, turning a regional product into the public identity of the settlement itself

Cheese became a village economy

The village is run through a mix of shared facilities and resident businesses. The member-run pizza program has a concrete name and address: Cheese-on Pizza at 142-23 Cheese Village-gil uses rice dough and Imsil cheese for its workshop. The main shop and Imsil N Cheese Café also sell named local products such as Cheese-ga queso blanco and halloumi. The village chronology records a development fund, a small library, dairy workshops and later community-school projects alongside the visitor programs

The main shop and cheese café open daily, while the experience hall works on a reservation basis from Wednesday through Sunday. Mozzarella-making is built for groups of at least 20 and uses hot water to stretch and form the cheese; the rice-pizza workshop can take individual visitors from two people upward. The official dairy special-zone plan separately designates 102,534 square metres of Geumseong-ri as the Cheese Village area

A regional food story works at human scale

Imsil now has a much larger cheese tourism landscape, including the Cheese Theme Park, a countywide dairy special zone and an annual festival. Cheese Village occupies a smaller and more domestic part of that system. Its interest comes from seeing how a food industry was translated into resident-run workshops, shops, training and rural tourism over two decades

A booked workshop gives the clearest reading of the place. The history is distributed between several sites, while much of the village’s present-day identity sits in programs operated by residents

Before you go

Decide whether you want the village itself, the nearby Cheese Theme Park, or the older cheese-history sites around Seongga-ri; they are separate stops. For one or two people, the rice-pizza workshop is easier to arrange than the group-based mozzarella program. The shop and café can be visited without booking an experience, while most hands-on programs require advance reservation