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40,000 Koreans just voted on where Korea is actually worth visiting — the 100x100 map is the anti-tourist-trap list

Reported 2026-08-24 / Posted 2026-08-24 · Compiled from Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announcements and Korean media reports · By

Korea's brutal summer is finally cracking at the edges — mornings have turned genuinely seasonal — and 40,145 Koreans just handed autumn planners a tool that didn't exist before. If you've been waiting out the heat (our heatwave tracker has been following the slow retreat week by week), this is the moment trips start getting sketched. And on August 19, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Tourism Organization published the results of the 100x100 Korea Attractions Project (대한민국 명소 발굴 100x100 프로젝트): a nationwide public vote — 1,538,035 votes cast — to crowd-pick the country's representative spots across 100 themes. This is not another government tourist list. It's what Koreans themselves actually vote for when nobody's marketing to them — and the winning themes prove it.

The essentials

  • What: the 100x100 project — 100 themed categories, each filled with crowd-voted spots, announced August 19, 2026
  • How it was built: 100 travel experts nominated candidates, then the public voted from June 29 to July 17 — 40,145 participants, 1,538,035 votes
  • What came out: 9,883 spots selected across the 100 themes — about 6,336 unique places once overlaps are removed
  • Where to see it: an interactive map at spot100x100.kr — pick a region or theme and the spots appear on a map. Korean-only, but very usable with a browser translate function
  • Why it's different: the most-voted themes are cheap eats, hidden old-school restaurants and bakery runs — not palaces and observation decks

What the 100x100 project actually is

Most "best of Korea" lists are assembled top-down: a tourism body picks the famous sights, adds a few regional balance picks, and publishes. The 100x100 project inverted that. First, 100 travel experts — writers, creators, regional specialists — nominated candidate spots. Then the whole thing was thrown open to a public vote from June 29 to July 17. 40,145 people took part and cast 1,538,035 votes, and the result is 9,883 spots across 100 themed categories — everything from food and nature to history and neighborhood culture. Because one place can win in several themes, the deduplicated total comes to roughly 6,336 unique places nationwide.

The ministry says this isn't a one-off: the list is planned to be updated periodically, with seasonal campaigns built on top of it — explicitly aimed at pushing travel beyond the Seoul area into the regions Koreans themselves rate highly. For travelers, that means the map should get better over time, not stale.

What Koreans actually voted for — and why it matters

Here's the part that tells you this list is real. The single most-voted theme in the entire project was "good-price restaurants" (착한 가격 식당) — places locals rate for honest value. The rest of the top themes follow the same instinct:

  • Hidden old-school eateries (숨은 노포) — decades-old restaurants tucked away from main streets
  • Right-now seasonal food (제철음식) — where to eat what's in season, this month
  • Modern-history landmarks (근현대 역사 명소) — the 20th-century layer of Korea that most tourist itineraries skip
  • Bread pilgrimage (빵지순례) — Korea's beloved national sport of bakery-hopping

Read that list again: three of the top five themes are about eating well without being ripped off. That's the same national nerve we saw in the Gwangjang Market pricing story — Koreans take fair food pricing seriously, and now they've effectively published a national map of where they think it still exists. For a foreign traveler, that's the closest thing you'll get to 40,000 local friends pointing at their own favorites.

The headline winners

  • Top vote-getter in a single category: Seongsimdang (성심당), the famous bakery in Daejeon — a fitting champion for the country that voted "bread pilgrimage" into its top themes.
  • Highest combined votes across themes: Seongsan Ilchulbong (성산일출봉) on Jeju, the sunrise volcanic peak, which appeared in 22 different themes — locals vote for it as scenery, hike, sunrise spot and more.
  • #2 combined: the National Museum of Korea in Seoul — fresh off its global moment, and clearly as loved at home as it is abroad.

How to actually use it

The results live on an interactive map at spot100x100.kr, launched August 19 and linked from VisitKorea's Korean-language service. Pick a region or a theme, and the winning spots appear on a map. Two honest caveats, and a workflow that gets around both:

  • The site is in Korean. There's no English version. Open it in Chrome or Safari with the browser translate function switched on, or run pages through Papago — the theme names and place names translate well enough to browse.
  • Copy-paste is your friend. Many winners are small local places with no English web presence. Copy the Korean name from the site and paste it into Naver Map — Korea's dominant map app, with an English interface — and you'll get the location, hours and photos that Google Maps often lacks in Korea.
  • Stuck? The 1330 tourism hotline is free, 24/7 and multilingual — call or chat and they'll help you find or book anything on the list.

Honest take

Let's be clear about what this is: a Korean-language tool made by Koreans, for Koreans — and that's precisely why it's worth your time. Every list built for tourists eventually bends toward places that can handle tourists; this one never had that filter, which makes it the closest thing Korea has published to an anti-tourist-trap list. But expect friction. The interface is Korean-only. Some winning "spots" will turn out to be a single noodle shop in a back alley with a handwritten menu and no English anywhere. Treat that as the point, not the problem: with a translate app, Naver Map and a copied-and-pasted Korean name, you can eat where 40,000 locals told each other to eat — and if it goes sideways, 1330 speaks your language. As autumn opens up, this is the planning layer we'd put under any trip that wants to leave the Seoul bubble.

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