Ten Korean Festivals in October: Which Websites Have English, and What to Do About the Four That Don't
Ten festivals are running in Korea this month, and finding the list is the easy part. Then you click through to a festival's own website, hit a wall of Korean, and go back to whichever blog post you found the list on.
Do the opposite. Open the Korean page and press translate. That is where the day-by-day programme sits.
I opened all ten official sites in a browser on 28 September 2026 to see how far you get without Korean. Six of the ten hand you an English link on the front page. That leaves four without one.
What each festival publishes, and where
Dates below come from the Korea Tourism Organization's English list, Korea's TOP 14 Autumn Festivals in 2026, which its own page says was updated 1 September 2026. Ten of those fourteen run in October. The English column records what I found on each festival's front page.
| Festival | Official site | Dates | English | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Andong Maskdance | maskdance.com | 24 Sep – 4 Oct | en.maskdance.com |
| 2 | Busan Rock | busanrockfestival.com | 2 – 4 Oct | global ticket page |
| 3 | Geumsan Ginseng | insamfestival.co.kr | 2 – 11 Oct | insamfestival.com/en/ |
| 4 | Jinju Lanterns | yudeung.com | 3 – 18 Oct | no link |
| 5 | Suwon Hwaseong | shfestival.com | 4 – 11 Oct | en.shfestival.com |
| 6 | Busan Film (BIFF) | biff.kr | 6 – 15 Oct | biff.kr/eng |
| 7 | Sunchang Jang | jangfestival.co.kr | 15 – 18 Oct | jangfestival.co.kr/en |
| 8 | Gangneung Coffee | coffeefestival.net | 21 – 25 Oct | no link |
| 9 | Gwangju Kimchi | kimchi.gwangju.go.kr | 23 – 25 Oct | no link |
| 10 | Gimcheon Gimbap | gimbapcity.kr | 23 – 25 Oct | no link |
The other four of the fourteen are Muju (4–12 Sep), Seoul Street Arts (19–20 Sep), Seoul Fireworks (5 Sep) and Gumi (6–8 Nov). Three have finished; Gumi is in November.
Which four have no English link?
Jinju Lanterns, Gangneung Coffee, Gwangju Kimchi and Gimcheon Gimbap. Lanterns, coffee, kimchi and a whole festival built around gimbap.
None of the four puts an English link on its front page. That is the precise claim, and it is worth keeping precise: I checked front pages, not every subpage. Jinju shows why the distinction matters. Its page title and menus are in Korean, while the hero carries the strings Main event and We Are The World. So there is English on the page, just no way in from the front.
Two of the four were counting down when I looked. Gimcheon's front page ran a clock above the dates 2026.10.23(금) ~ 10.25(일) 10:00 ~ 18:00, headed 김천김밥축제 개막까지, "until Gimcheon Gimbap Festival opens." Gangneung's showed 제18회, je-sip-pal-hoe, "the 18th edition," with a countdown badge beside its dates.
So the four are not the ones to skip. Open the Korean page, let the browser translate, and read the programme from behind the Korean menu.
The same lesson turned up on the English side. Andong's English site sits at en.maskdance.com, and the link from the Korean site points at en.maskdance.com/2024/main.asp. A path with last year's year in it looks abandoned. Open it and the page reads 2026. 9. 24. Thu ~ 10. 4. Sun. The Korean site uses those same /2024/ paths for its own pages, so the number belongs to the directory structure. I opened the other five English pages too. Suwon's is headed 63rd Suwon Hwaseong Festival, with a 2026 leaflet to download; BIFF's carries the 31st edition. Sunchang, Geumsan and Busan Rock were all on 2026 as well. None of the ten sites, in either language, was out of date.
Two words worth recognising
You do not need Korean for this. You need to recognise two menu items, because a translated menu will not always call them "programme" and "notices."
프로그램, peurogeuraem, programme. The day-by-day schedule. Gangneung and Gimcheon both carry it on the front page, and Jinju files it as 주요프로그램, juyo peurogeuraem, "main programme."
공지사항, gongjisahang, notices. Literally 공지 notice plus 사항 matters. This is where a change gets posted, whether a time moved or a programme was cancelled for weather. Jinju, Gangneung and Gwangju all carry one on the front page.
Gimcheon is the exception. It calls the same thing 축제소식, chukje sosik, "festival news." If you scan a translated menu for "notices" and come up empty, look for "news."
Practical things I ran into
Andong leaves from Cheongnyangni, not Seoul Station. The KTX-Eum line to Andong runs out of Cheongnyangni, and Andong's city tourism site puts the journey at roughly two hours. One listed service does it in 1h37m, but services vary, so plan for two.
Five of the ten are confirmed free to walk into. Andong, Jinju, Sunchang, Gwangju and Gimcheon charge nothing at the gate, with specific experiences and indoor programmes priced separately. Andong's indoor maskdance performance runs about 6,000 won booked ahead. Treat that figure as approximate: it comes from secondary sources, not from the festival's own page.
Geumsan runs its English pages on a different domain. They sit at insamfestival.com/en/, linked from the Language menu on the Korean front page at insamfestival.co.kr.
Sunchang links a shuttle you book ahead. Its site carries a booking link rather than a bus timetable, which matters if you were planning to turn up at a terminal and improvise. Sunchang is the long one here: roughly four hours from Seoul by express bus, cross-checked across sources with no official figure to quote.
Gwangju's "directions" page is broken. That subpage URL returns a genuine 404. The main site is fine, so navigate from the top rather than from a search result.
The short version
- Start from KTO's English list for what is on and when
- Then open the festival's own page and translate it. That is where the day-by-day programme sits
- Six put an English link on the front page: Andong, Busan Rock, Geumsan, Suwon, BIFF, Sunchang
- The other four have no English link on the front page: Jinju, Gangneung, Gwangju, Gimcheon
- Look for 프로그램 and 공지사항 in a translated menu. At Gimcheon, notices are 축제소식
What I checked, and what I didn't
Everything above about websites comes from opening them on 28 September 2026 in a browser, and from the KTO list as it stood that day. Sites change, and a festival can post a notice tomorrow that moves a date.
When I first pulled these sites programmatically, two of them answered 403: Gimcheon and Suwon. Opened in an ordinary browser, both returned 200. A 403 from a Korean festival site usually means it is refusing robots, not that it has gone dark, so a scraper or a chatbot fetching pages for you can report a healthy site as dead.
I checked front pages rather than whole sites. Where this article says "no English link," that is the claim.
Gangneung's site carries no admission information that I could find, which is why it is not on the free-entry list above. The free-entry figures for the other five come from secondary sources. I could not confirm them on the festivals' own pages.
One date oddity: for Sunchang, the festival's own site and the KTO list both say 15–18 October, while a press release from the Sunchang Fermentation Tourism Foundation, which organises it, says 16–18. 15–18 is what this article uses. If you are travelling for opening day specifically, check before you book.
A page you cannot read is not a door that is closed. Translate it and the schedule is right there, behind the Korean menu. Give your browser ten seconds of work.
Most of these are two to four hours out of Seoul, which makes them a better weekend than a day trip. If you are going alone, the seat I take when I am eating by myself covers the part of travelling solo nobody writes about, and drinking by the Han River needs no train at all.
Do it with a local Akasha, an app for finding local meetups and experiences in Korea, is where people list what's happening nearby on the day you're actually free, sound baths to Sunday hikes, alongside trips from registered Korean travel companies: iOS / Android
One question for the comments, and I do read them: has a translated page ever got you somewhere an English one couldn't?
Who wrote this. I run Akasha and write this blog from Seoul. I haven't been to all ten of these. What I did do was open every one of their websites on 28 September 2026 and write down what was on them. More at @akasha.korea.
Sources
- Korea Tourism Organization, "Korea's TOP 14 Autumn Festivals in 2026" — https://english.visitkorea.or.kr/svc/contents/contentsView.do?menuSn=219&vcontsId=1593098 (page states last updated 2026-09-01; read 2026-09-28)
- Festival sites, all opened 2026-09-28 in Chromium with a standard browser user agent: maskdance.com · en.maskdance.com/2024/main.asp · busanrockfestival.com · insamfestival.co.kr · insamfestival.com/en/ · yudeung.com · shfestival.com · en.shfestival.com · biff.kr · biff.kr/eng/ · jangfestival.co.kr · jangfestival.co.kr/en · coffeefestival.net · kimchi.gwangju.go.kr · gimbapcity.kr
- Andong Tourism (Andong city), KTX-Eum timetable, Cheongnyangni to Andong — https://www.tourandong.com/eng/sub5/sub3.cshtml
- Sunchang Fermentation Tourism Foundation, festival press release — https://www.sftf.or.kr/bbs/board.php?bo_table=event&wr_id=39
- Express bus timetable, Seoul to Sunchang — https://bustrain.kr/expressbus/503
- Free-entry status for Andong, Jinju, Sunchang, Gwangju and Gimcheon, and Andong's indoor performance price: cross-checked secondary sources, not confirmed against the festivals' own pages
Photographs are Pexels and Unsplash licensed works, credited beneath each image.