Songdo

Korea’s first public beach opened in 1913, and by the 1960s, Songdo was the honeymoon destination, so popular that a cable car was built in 1964, the country’s first. Then came the crash: water pollution, overdevelopment, and by the 1990s, total abandonment. The cable cars stopped running in 1988. For nearly three decades, the tracks sat empty above the water. In 2017, after years of coastal restoration, the cars returned, now stretching four times their original distance across the sea. Today the beach draws five million visitors a year, but the haenyeo still wade in at dawn, harvesting seaweed by hand as they have for centuries.

The restoration project did what restoration projects rarely manage: it made the replacement bigger than the thing it replaced. The original 1964 cable car covered 420 meters, a modest hop from the beach to a nearby hill. Its 2017 successor covers 1.62 kilometers, gliding over open sea toward Amnam Park with glass-bottomed cabins for anyone who wants a clearer view of the water below. It is, in effect, a monument to Korea’s confidence that Songdo’s second act would outshine its first, and by most measures, it has. The haenyeo divers, meanwhile, missed the entire spectacle. They were in the water long before the cable cars first went up and kept working through the decades the beach sat empty, unbothered by pollution reports or tourism statistics, occupied instead with the considerably less glamorous business of finding seaweed by feel.