North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inaugurates a new luxury mountain resort in Samjiyon, featuring hotels, hot tubs and barbecue restaurants.
SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has opened a lavish new mountain resort complete with “cosy” leisure spaces, barbecue restaurants and hot tubs.
State media reported the new facility in Samjiyon, in the country’s mountainous north, would serve as an “attractive mountainous tourist resort and leisure ground for the people”.
The official Korean Central News Agency said Kim toured “bedrooms of hotels, cosy leisure spaces and commercial and public catering facilities”.
Images showed Kim, accompanied by his daughter, testing the firmness of beds in the new hotels.
He held the resort up as “clear proof of the ever-growing ideal of our people and our state’s potential for development”.
State media said the new facilities showed the North Korean people were the “most dignified” and have “nothing to envy in the world”.
The reports did not mention what fees would be charged for the average North Korean, who analysts say typically earns up to $3 a month in state-run factories.
Samjiyon carries potent symbolism in North Korean propaganda due to its proximity to Mount Paektu.
Official accounts state Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, was born on the peninsula’s highest mountain, though historians largely agree he was actually born in the Soviet Union.
